M31 Andromeda Galaxy #19 (Molly Wakeling)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Andromeda (And) · Contains: Andromeda Galaxy · M 110 · M 31 · M 32 · NGC 205 · NGC 206 · NGC 221 · NGC 224

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M31 Andromeda Galaxy #19

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M31 Andromeda Galaxy #19

It is surprisingly difficult to image, despite its brightness (you can see it naked-eye as a smudge under moderately dark skies!) -- this is attempt #19! And it's one of my better ones, I think. It's tough here with all the light pollution, but I did manage to pick up a lot of really cool detail -- quite a few deep red nebulae are scattered throughout the dust bands!

The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest galaxy to our own (ignoring the couple of dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way) at 2.5 million lightyears distant. It's over twice the width of our own galaxy at 220,000 lightyears across, although it has a total mass similar to ours. About 4.5 billion years from now, the Milky Way and Andromeda will merge into a galactic mess.

In the first two decades of the 20th century, Andromeda was thought to be a nebula -- galaxies other than our own were not yet known, and we thought the universe was a lot smaller. A type of variable star known as a Cepheid variable provided an important clue to discovering the true distance to M31; Cepheid variables vary in brightness at a frequency that is closely tied to their luminosity, and since several Cepheids in our own galaxy had been measured, we knew the relationship pretty well. In 1925, Edwin Hubble (for whom the Hubble Space Telescope was named) discovered some Cepheid variables in M31 as well that were much dimmer than their counterparts in our own galaxy, which solidified the fact that Andromeda wasn't in fact a nebula, but was an entirely separate galaxy. Our concept of the vastness of the universe grew immensely.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	3975374
PixInsight job	8RSJL62MMOO2R3UWMBP1HXDAS6DUD2TO
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	00h43m03s.65
RA (top/left)	00h47m54s.26
RA (top/right)	00h40m00s.15
RA (bottom/right)	00h38m09s.71
RA (bottom/left)	00h46m11s.69

Dec (center)	+41°21′20″.8
Dec (top/left)	+40°58′17″.6
Dec (top/right)	+40°33′09″.5
Dec (bottom/right)	+41°43′36″.4
Dec (bottom/left)	+42°09′13″.7

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M31 Andromeda Galaxy #19

M31 Andromeda Galaxy #19

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M31 Andromeda Galaxy #19

M31 Andromeda Galaxy #19

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