This is an image of the Triangulum Galaxy, M-33, as seen by the MMT Observatory in Arizona, using its new Megacam instrument. The camera houses 36 CCD chips which combine to create a nine million pixel image (340 Megapixels), making it one of the world's biggest digital cameras. M-33 sits quite close to us, at about 2.4 million light-years distant. The only major galaxy closer to us is the Andromeda Galaxy, at about 2.2 million light-years. The image highlights clusters of young blue stars, dusty regions within the spiral arms, and active starbirth areas exhibiting pink coloured hydrogen gas filaments. In the upper left you can see the massive nebula NGC-604, an intense star-forming region spanning some 1500 light-years. The galaxy is relatively small compared to our Milky Way. It holds a mass estimated to be equal to 10 to 40 billion of our suns. Our own galaxy contains the mass equivalent to about 200 billion of our suns. The galaxy lies in the direction of the constellation Triangulum.

Image Credit: N.Caldwell/B.McLeod/A.Szentgyorgyi/SAO

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