My ZWO Auto Focuser arrived, I installed, setup and thought using the L-Pro filter would be a good choice so I decided to settle on M31 for the night of testing.  I have to say what took me so long on picking up an Auto focuser, I think I might just get another for my Zenith Star 61, or should I get a filter wheel for my main.  I don't have the funds just as yet to go transition to a 2600mm camera, so why not do it piece meal.

The Andromeda Galaxy was named after the area of the sky that it occupies, the constellation Andromeda, which represents the princess Andromeda in Greek mythology. Andromeda was chained to a rock and left to a sea monster to appease Poseidon after her mother Cassiopeia had boasted that her daughter’s beauty surpassed that of the sea nymphs. The princess was saved by Perseus, the Greek hero represented by the neighbouring constellation.The Andromeda Galaxy is relatively easy to find in the sky as it is one of the brightest Messier objects. It lies in the vicinity of two prominent asterisms in the northern sky: the Great Square of Pegasus (formed by Alpheratz, Algenib, Markab and Scheat) and Cassiopeia’s W. The only objects listed in Messier’s catalogue that are brighter than M31 are the Pleiades (M45) and the Ptolemy Cluster (M7).The Andromeda Galaxy is one of the most distant deep sky objects visible to the naked eye. The best time of year to observe it is during the months of October, November and December.Messier 31 is the largest and most massive member of the Local Group of galaxies, which also includes the Milky Way, the Triangulum Galaxy (M33) and more than 40 smaller galaxies. The Andromeda Galaxy contains a trillion stars, more than twice as many as the Milky Way, which is home to 200 to 400 billion stars.The two galaxies are roughly equal in mass and will collide in about 3.75 billion years. The collision will likely result in a new giant elliptical galaxy or disk galaxy being formed.The Andromeda Galaxy has a total of 14 satellite galaxies, of which Messier 32 and Messier 110 are the largest and easiest to observe.M32 is believed to have undergone a close encounter with M31, which resulted in the smaller galaxy losing its stellar disk and undergoing a dramatic increase in star forming activity in the central region. The starburst activity ended in the relatively recent past.The Andromeda Galaxy was long believed to be a nebula in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and was known as the Great Andromeda Nebula. It wasn’t until 1917 that this belief started to be questioned. American astronomer Heber Curtis saw a nova within the galaxy and, after going over the photographic record, found 11 more novae in the region. He noticed that the novae within M31 were about 10 magnitudes fainter than those observed elsewhere in the sky and came up with a new distance estimate for the object: 500,000 light years.Curtis became a proponent of a new theory which introduced the idea that the objects known as spiral nebulae were in fact independent galaxies. The theory was known as the “island universes” hypothesis. The term “island universes” came from German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who also believed that spiral nebulae were not part of our galaxy.In 1920, Curtis debated the nature of spiral nebulae and the size of the universe with Harlow Shapley in what is known as the Great Debate or the Shapley-Curtis Debate. The debate took place on April 26 at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Shapley argued that spiral nebulae were part of the Milky Way and that the universe was composed of only one large galaxy, while Curtis contended that spiral nebulae were separate galaxies and that the Milky Way was just one of many galaxies.The true nature of M31 was not proven until 1923, when Edwin Hubble established the intergalactic distance between Andromeda and the Milky Way. Hubble identified Cepheid variable stars outside the Milky Way on astronomical images of M31. He did this using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles, the largest instrument in the world at the time. Hubble’s original estimate placed M31 at an approximate distance of 750,000 light years from Earth.German astronomer Walter Baade was the first to resolve stars in the Andromeda Galaxy’s central region in 1943. He was also the one to classify stars into two population types: Type I and Type II. He found that each type had a distinct kind of Cepheid variable, which led to distance estimates for M31 doubling and Baade deducing that the universe was about twice as big and old as previously believed.Baade named the young stars in the Andromeda Galaxy’s disk Type I and the more evolved, red stars in the bulge Type II. The nomenclature was later applied to stars within our own galaxy.Messier 31 is approaching the Milky Way at about 110 km/s. It is one of the few blueshifted galaxies (moving toward us) from our point of view.Andromeda is expected to directly collide with our galaxy in about 4 billion years. The collision will most likely result in a merger of the two large galaxies into a giant elliptical galaxy, and possibly even a large disk galaxy. Before the galaxies merge, our solar system may be ejected from the Milky Way and join Andromeda.The Andromeda Galaxy was formed out of a collision between two smaller galaxies between 5 and 9 billion years ago according to a study released in 2010.A research published in 2012 estimated an age of roughly 10 billion years for the galaxy, stating that M31 formed from the merger of multiple smaller protogalaxies.The violent collision that took place about 8 billion years ago resulted in most of the galaxy’s metal-rich halo and extended disk being formed.Star forming activity was probably intense at that point and resulted in M31 becoming a luminous infrared galaxy (LIRG) for about 100 million years.These galaxies emit more in the infrared than at all other wavelengths put together. An average luminosity of a LIRG is 100 billion times solar.Between 2 and 4 billion years ago, Andromeda had a close encounter with the Triangulum Galaxy (M33), which incited high levels of star formation across the galactic disk of M31 and distorted Triangulum‘s outer disk.The Andromeda Galaxy has a counter-rotating disk of gas in its central region, which is populated by relatively young stars.This is believed to be the result of a merger with a smaller galaxy that took place about 100 million years ago.The earliest record of M31 comes from the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi, who mentioned the chained constellation, referring to Andromeda, or the Chained Maiden, in his Book of Fixed Stars in 964. Al-Sufi described the Andromeda Galaxy as a “small cloud.”The first documented telescopic observation of the galaxy was provided by the German astronomer Simon Marius on December 15, 1612

@information from Messier-objects.com