The Starfront Collective Telescope is a collective distributed aperture telescope at our remote observatory in Texas. Imagine the dragonfly array, but instead of being on one large mount, the Starfront Collective is distributed between many individual user systems. Since our last project, the Ancile SNR in Scutum SNR G25.1-2.3, the size of the telescope has grown rapidly. For this second project, we decided to set our sights on the Triangulum Galaxy M33 with the hope of investigating the galaxy for low surface brightness narrowband features.

Capturing:

The capturing of this image took place over the course of two months during the new moon, with 25 participants the group was able to collect approximately 150hrs of exposure time per night. So while a 1000-hour integration task may seem monumental, it only required about 12 days of observing nights to complete. A large diversity of filter types were used, for the purpose of simplicity in the exposure details I have simplified all the setups to Antlia filters. We biased for taking longer exposures for both NB and LRGB, with exposure times ranging from 600s to 1800s depending on the tracking capability of contributor setups.

Processing:

The image was processed first by each individual contributor stacking their completed master images for their total exposure time. Then each master image was registered and integrated in APP as if they were individual subframes. With the fully calibrated data sets all captured from the same location, over the same course of time, it makes coadding all of the images very simple. The only reason to integrate only calibrated subframes would be for enhanced pixel rejection, which we get a sufficient amount of anyways by stacking masters from so many contributors.

The Details:

What was revealed after over 1000 hours of exposure? In the Oiii channel, there was nothing of interest to note. On the other hand, the H-alpha channel showed signs of some ultra-faint and diffuse cirrus clouds. The luminance channels did not reveal any new tidal features, however, there was a fair amount of background dust that could be seen with this much exposure time. It was still incredibly faint and difficult to process. Here is an inverse stretched image showing the background luminance details:

While not much was revealed in the large-scale details, there was a really amazing amount of signal present for the star-forming regions inside of M33 itself, especially in the Oiii channel:

For the H-alpha channel, there is not much new details in the galactic Hii regions, but here is what we saw for the faint cirrus signal in the background. It showed up as a couple of ultra-faint bands:

We hope you all enjoy the image! Thank you to everyone who contributed to the project. If you are interested in joining up, you can learn more about our observatory and our projects here.