Triangulum Galaxy 1/2025
After getting a nice shot of Andromeda, I trained my camera on Triangulum. While it’s only a little farther away from us than Andromeda, it’s a decent bit dimmer. As I was looking at the photo, I saw what initially looked like a star, but as I looked more closely I thought “that looks more like a galaxy”. Sure enough, it was another galaxy, and quite a bit further away. The galaxy I was looking at is PGC 5899 - a staggering 445 Million Light Years away, which makes Triangulum look right next door at a paltry 2.7 Million Light Years. It still amazes me that the photons hitting my camera left that galaxy 445 Million Years ago and somehow made it all the way right to me. 445 Million Years ago was long before the dinosaurs, and earth was going through the Ordovician Extinction.
Looking at the annotated version of the photo, there are a lot of interesting things there. After my first few photographs of Triangulum, I was wondering if it was going to be worth it, since it didn’t seem to have quite the visual appeal of Andromeda. But I’m really glad I stuck with it and got to the finished (for now) product. Quite a bit of interesting detail was revealed after a lot of additional exposure time.
As with my earlier Andromeda shot, this was taken from my roof in Pacifica with my normal camera and telephoto lens.
