Thursday, November 08, 2007

At last: M33 Triangle nebula

At last, after a very long search I found the M33/NGC598 (spiral galaxy) yesterday. It is also called the triangle nebula, magn. 5.7, in Triangulum, under Andromeda. It is 3.000.000 lightyears away from us. From yellow star Beta Andromeda up to M31 is the same distance as towards M33, but then you have to go down. This is the most far away deepsky object that is visible with the naked eye. It was -very faintly- visible at 40x. But it has to be very dark, which is not the case in my light-polluted backyard.This is how I found it: Put scope on tip of the triangle (alpha Triangulum), on the sides there are 2 lines with 2 stars, they point where to go, then to small triangle (with star sao74921), it points to the correct direction, then slightly bigger triangle (star HR485) and then via the line (with star HD10133) towards M33, note that it has another triangle (with star HD9444) nearby. It was only very faintly visible on 40x in the 200mm F/5 newton. It will definately not be visible in the 90mmF10 refractor. But I know now how to find it, so next time I will make some pictures.

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