The Andromeda Galaxy, M31, a truly magnificent sight. It is the sister of our own galaxy and the closest major galaxy with a distance of only 2.5 million light years. Our Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Triangulum Galaxy, M33, are members of the Local Group, which also hosts a number of smaller galaxies all in gravitational interaction with each other. M31 contains about 1 trillion stars, twice as many as our home galaxy. It is accompanied by the satellite galaxies M32 (below the center of M31) and M110 (upper-right quadrant).
It’s not only one of the brightest Messier objects it is also quite large… six times the full moon in diameter. Under good conditions you can easily spot a smudge of light from this grand galaxy with the naked eye.
Ar large object requires a large image: It is a six-panel mosaic with a whooping 50 mega-pixels of final data – if you click on the image to get a full-screen view, you will see a down-sampled version with 25% of the pixels. The individual panels only use a little over 2 hours of LRGB exposures with 120sec each.
| Telescope | CFF Triplet APO 160mm, Riccardi Reducer, f=810mm |
| Camera | ASI1600MM Pro, 8-Slot Filter Wheel with Baader Filters |
| Exposures | 2×3 Mosaic, LRGB, 6 x 4 x 18 x 120sec, ~14 hours total |
| Data taken | 26 – 30 September 2019 |
| Site | TURMX @ E-EyE Observatory, Extremadura |
| Processing | Robert Roth, 11 October 2019 |