Daily Image
16-02-2007
M33, the Pinwheel Galaxy
| Submitter: | Albert van Duin |
| Description: | M33 was one of the first "Spiral Nebulae" identified by William Parsons, the Third Earl of Rosse (Birr Castle, Ireland) with his 72-inch (183cm) reflector telescope in the 1840s. The Pinwheel galaxy M33 is another prominent member of the Local Group of galaxies, though it is smaller than M31 and our own Milky way galaxy. Its distance is about 3 million light-years. A number of emission nebulae inside of M33 can be seen in this image, the biggest one has an NGC number of its own, NGC604. It is visible in this image as a small pink patch in the lower left region of M33. Its diameter is about 1,500 light-years, it has a spectrum similar to that of the Orion nebula and is one of the biggest ionized H II regions known in the universe. This galaxy is visible to the unaided eye under exeptionally good conditions and may be the most distant object that can be seen by the naked eye. It has a total magnitude of about 6, but as this light is distributed over an area as big as four times that of the full moon, its surface brightness is extremely low. The image was aquired with an 20cm ASA Astrograph from Beilen on January 14, 2007 and is a 33 minute exposure at 800 ISO. More images can be found at: http://members.home.nl/technoplus/ |
| Copyright: | Albert van Duin |
| Tweet |  |