Here's an image of M33, the Triangulum Galaxy, that I took at the 2008 Okie-Tex Star Party a couple of weeks ago.
M33 is fairly large in apparent size, so even though it is a little over 6th magnitude, it's rather faint in appearance. The dark skies at Okie-Tex this year allowed me to see M33 with the naked eye as a faint fuzzy patch in the sky. At one point, I saw an airplane fly right over the patch.
M33 is probably the farthest object that I have ever visually observed without the aid of a telescope. It's distance is believed to be somewhere around 2.8 million light years away.
The shape of M33 is truly awesome, showing a clear face-on spiral pattern. I've viewed M33 through an eyepiece many times, including through Bob & Glenn's Dobsonians at Okie-Tex, and it exhibits some definite spiral structure. Images really bring out the spiral pattern, as well as numerous H-alpha regions and newly formed stars. The spiral pattern is a fascinating shape that shows up over and over again in nature. Things from terrible hurricances to beautiful seashells display intricately wound spirals. Spirals can be described mathematically and the forces that shape them can be explained with physics, which only adds to the beauty involved when one observes them.
To see a larger version of this image, click here. I took a lot of data on M33, but had to discard much of it due to some clouds that rolled through.
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