This is the fourth time I’ve imaged M33 and the second time on this scope (though the first time with this camera). The new camera has a slightly smaller chip than the new camera but the new camera has smaller pixels and much lower read noise so it’s a worthwhile tradeoff. But, that means if you want to do a target that won’t fit into the field of view, it’s mosaic time. To make this one work, we needed a 2×2 mosaic which stars to enter the world of fairly complex to manage. Thankfully, I had only one hiccough building the mosaic and then another on discovered later on deconvolution settings so I constructed the mosaic 3 times (times 5 filters each with 4 panels). It’s not hard but it is fairly tedious and easy to mess up and there is a failure mode where you can (appear to) do everything right and still get a bad result (of course, I hit that one) but the result was worth it!

If you look at the entire image, you won’t really notice anything different from scopes with larger FoV’s. But, if you zoom in and pan around – that’s where the magic is! There is so much amazing detail in this galaxy that is probably around 2.7 million light years away. It’s smaller than our Milky Way or the Andromeda Galaxy but it’s easier to image than Andromeda because the dynamic range isn’t as extreme. Since M33 is part of our local group of galaxies, it’s pretty close by galactic standards making it much easier to see the details in this galaxy and there are a lot of details to see.

This is 42h 5m of HaLRGB data. For all the technical details, see astrobin.