The M33 spiral galaxy, also known as the Triangulum galaxy, is located around 3 million light years away in the constellation of its namesake. Its swirling arms of gas and dust where much of the galaxy’s star-forming regions are located give it a distinctive pinwheel shape. At 50,000 light years across, it is roughly half the size of our own Milky Way, and is steadily moving towards the Andromeda galaxy which it is thought to be gravitationally bound with. M33 is the third largest galaxy in the Local Group and is one of the most distant stellar objects visible to the naked eye. It was discovered first by Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Hodierna before Charles Messier later catalogued it in 1764. M33 contains around 40 billion stars, compared to 400 billion for the Milky Way, and 1000 billion stars for Andromeda.and a recent discovery by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory shows that it contains the largest black hole known to astronomy, at 15.7 times the mass of our sun.

This image was taken with a Canon 40D modified DSLR and an 8" F/8 Ritchey Chretien Astrograph. Exposure settings are 37 x 5 mins. @ ISO 1600 captured in Nebulosity. Processing in Images Plus and Photoshop CS5.

Galaxy information researched by Craig Grice