By far my most ambitious project yet, it took me three weeks to get 42 hours of data on the Triangulum Galaxy, our fourth closest neighbor after the Andromeda galaxy. The moon and clouds fought me the entire way, but it was worth it getting this much data on this target. The off axis guider was the real champion this month, averaging 0.5 to 0.6 arcseconds RMS consistently every night.
No, that’s not a noisy image you see. All the the dim specks are star clusters in the galaxy. The noise was minimal with this much data, and I only applied a wavelet denoise, unsharp mask, and saturation boost to the image. The details comes naturally when you have 630 four minute exposures!
Check out my attempt last year with my dobsonian for a comparison.
