I installed a new color camera recently and finally had good weather conditions to give it a try. Also known and M33, the Pinwheel Galaxy is in the constellation Triangulum and is the third largest member of our Local Group of galaxies after the Milky Way and Andromeda. It’s 2.7 million lightyears away and consists of about 40 billion stars (by comparison the Milky Way has 100 billion and Andromeda more than 1 trillion).
With the company of guests watching, I took some short exposures of popular winter objects like the Andromeda Galaxy, The Pleiades and the Orion Nebula. Then, using an automated sequence in a program called NINA (Nighttime Imaging “N” Astronomy) I took 100 60s exposures with the 12.5 inch telescope and then combined them in Pixinsight – sort of a Photoshop for astrophotography. I think it turned out nice.
