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Spiral galaxy M33 is
a mid-sized member of our
Local Group of
Galaxies.
M33 is also called the
Triangulum Galaxy
for the
constellation in which it resides. About four times smaller (in
radius) than our Milky Way
Galaxy and the Andromeda
Galaxy (M31), it is much larger than the many of the local
dwarf
spheroidal galaxies. M33's
proximity to
M31 causes it to be thought by some to be a satellite galaxy of this
more massive galaxy. M33's
proximity to our
Milky Way
Galaxy causes it to appear more than twice the angular size of the
Full Moon,
and be visible with a good pair of binoculars.
This image is a composite from black and white images taken with the Palomar Observatory's 48-inch (1.2-meter) Samuel Oschin Telescope as a part of the second National Geographic Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS II). The images were recorded on two type of glass photographic plates - one sensitive to red light and the other to blue and later they were digitized. Credit: Caltech, Palomar Observatory, Digitized Sky Survey. In order to produce the color image seen
here, I worked with a total of 50 different
frames, 25 for each color band, coming from 2 different plates taken
in 1991 and 1992.
The image shown is large 8,743x8,684 pixels and is a crop from a larger file with a resolution of about 1 arcsec per pixel. The image show an area of sky large
2.4° x 2.4° (for
comparison, the full-Moon is about 0.5° in diameter). Other images of the same celestial field found online |
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