9 months in from taking my first ever image and I feel this is my most complete image to date, especially where exposure integration is concerned. I’ve still got a long road ahead of me, but am super thrilled to have got even this far.

Andromeda is without doubt one of my all time favourite galaxies.

This image has seriously tested my capabilities, knowledge, equipment and patience to the MAX and has been far more difficult to finalise than I ever imagined. That said, I have learnt so so much during the last 7 / 8 weeks whilst trying to give this target the attention it deserves.

I started my Andromeda adventure in October in the back yard. I also integrated some exposure time from my recent trip to Kielder Forest, Northumberland (the darkest skies in England) which boasts Class 3 Bortle skies, and is an absolute treat to visit. I cannot say enough about the skies at Kielder, they are truly special, and for sure the most pristine skies I've ever had the privilege to witness.

The majority of the data (approx. 13 hours) was captured in my back yard under class 5 Bortle with this being topped up with a good hour from Kielder (weather wasn't so kind even over 4 nights of camping)

The first 40% of my light frames where taken with my stock Canon 200D and I had my camera Astro modified half way through this project so the remaining 60% where taken after the astromod in which I had the rear IR cut filter removed, and what a difference that made (for the good)

The light frames that I've integrated in this image (and this was an absolute first for me) includes frames taken before meridian passing (around 40%) and after the meridian passing (around 60%) which I was super nervous about and how DeepSkyStacker would handle stacking images at what was 179 degrees in opposite orientation, but it breezed through it and stacked all of my images no problem, even over 9 separate nights of imaging and 9 meridian flips, extremely impressive program for sure.

My only regret is that after 4 hours of capturing I noticed some quite severe lens distortion towards the edges of my frames, which is very much present in the final image. In hindsight, I wish I'd of stopped there and reset my field flattener and started again as I didn't realise that it wasn't set at the correct spacing (even though Id checked like a hundred times) but I just couldn't bring myself to throw away what was otherwise 4 hours worth of really nice clean data. Instead, I carried on and managed to bag around 16 hours on my target over the space of 2 months of which 14 hours worth was usable and is present within my final image, so that was an amazing result considering.

All said and done, I am thrilled with my final result and experienced another extremely valuable learning curve and a lot of lessons learnt by making mistakes, mistakes I'm now glad I made as hopefully not to repeat in the future.

I'm absolutely blown away with what I've managed to learn over the last few months and I cant wait to now get back out there and start on a new target.

My dear Andromeda, it has been an absolute blast and we will be seeing each other again some time in the future. But for now, time moves on to places new xxx