Up Close And Personal with M31
The Andromeda galaxy fills the frame and a little bit more in this image from Abiquiu Lake, NM.
Equipment:
SBIG STF-8300c
Software Bisque MyT Mount
Stellarvue SVQ100 Astrograph Refractor, 580mm @ f/5.8
Unguided
Software:
Pixinsight Commercial Version 1.8
Lightroom CC
Light Frames:
32 x 360 secs (3 hrs 12 mins)
Dark Frames:
20 x 360 secs (2 hrs)
M31, the largest galaxy ion our local group, at a distance of ~2.5 million light years, destined to collide with our own Milky Way galaxy in about 4 billion years or so (give or take.) One of the absolute farthest things to view with the naked eye, the core can be seen under moderately dark skies. More info found here (courtesy of Wikipedia):
The Andromeda Galaxy (/ænˈdrɒmɨdə/), also known as Messier 31, M31, or NGC 224, is a spiral galaxy approximately 780 kiloparsecs (2.5 million light-years) from Earth.[4] It is the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way and was often referred to as the Great Andromeda Nebula in older texts. It received its name from the area of the sky in which it appears, the constellation of Andromeda, which was named after the mythological princess Andromeda. Being approximately 220,000 light years across, it is the largest galaxy of the Local Group, which also contains the Milky Way, the Triangulum Galaxy, and about 44 other smaller galaxies.
The Andromeda Galaxy is the most massive galaxy in the Local Group as well.[7] Despite earlier findings that suggested that the Milky Way contains more dark matter and could be the most massive in the grouping,[12]the 2006 observations by the Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that Andromeda contains one trillion (1012) stars:[9] at least twice the number of stars in the Milky Way, which is estimated to be 200–400 billion.[13]
