You may have noticed Ted Forte's excellent article about M33 in the December issue of Sky & Telescope, and perhaps that it includes my drawing of M33. Actually, it includes only the central portion of it so I present the full negative and positive drawings here. They're greatly compressed from their full scans so I'm not sure how they'll come across on the forum, but at least you'll see the full extant of the galaxy I was able to see. The drawing was done with my 28 inch f4 using magnifications from 105x to 1200x over about 8 hours of eyepiece time spread out over four years. I didn't plan for this to take so long but unfortunately the best time to see M33 is when the rainy season begins in Oregon, so I've really had to practice patience with this one!
Big M33 originalsketch_cleaned_smallest.jpg Big M33 originalsketch_cleaned_invert_smallest.jpg
I've also made individual sketches of the NGC, IC and star associations in M33, but I'll save those for a different post. By the way, I used the finder chart by Steve Gottlieb at http://tinyurl.com/m4mrmy2 to navigate my way through M33, which I found surprisingly easy to get turned around in at first. The low surface brightness of this wonderful galaxy can make it a confusing neighborhood in a big scope, but what a great place to get lost in.
Reply With Quote