The Triangulum Galaxy

Added 1662976333 by Heavenly Bodies Studio.

The image is of the Triangulum Galaxy, a close neighbour to our galaxy at a mere 2.7 million light years away. Under very low light-polluted skies it is just about visible to the human eye, if you have good vision, and is probably the most distant object that can be see with the naked eye.

The galaxy has a diameter of about 60,000 light years and has about 40 billion stars, so is smaller than the Milky Way.

This was captured over two nights with a total of 14 hours of integrated images to reveal some of the finer details and also the red nebulae that are apparent within the galaxy.

To capture the faint details of the galaxy requires a telescope with specialised camera, equatorial mount to track the rotation of the earth and a separate guiding camera to accurately control the pointing of the telescope during the long exposures required. Many of these long-exposure images are stacked to increase the signal to noise ratio and reveal the colour and detail. The resulting high-resolution image is 42Mpixels.

The imaging equipment used is a Skywatcher Esprit 100ED Pro Telescope, a ZWO ASI2600MC Pro astro-camera, cooled to -20C on a Skywatcher EQ6-R Pro equatorial mount.