Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Cassiopeia (Cas)  ·  Contains:  Andromeda Galaxy  ·  M 31  ·  NGC 224  ·  NGC 281  ·  Part of the constellation Andromeda (And)  ·  Part of the constellation Cassiopeia (Cas)  ·  The star 51And  ·  The star Caph (βCas)  ·  The star Schedar (αCas)  ·  The star ζCas  ·  The star ηCas  ·  The star θCas  ·  The star μAnd  ·  The star νAnd  ·  The star οCas  ·  The star φAnd
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Andromeda over Cape Byron Lighthouse, Kelvin Hennessy
Andromeda over Cape Byron Lighthouse
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Andromeda over Cape Byron Lighthouse

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Andromeda over Cape Byron Lighthouse, Kelvin Hennessy
Andromeda over Cape Byron Lighthouse
Powered byPixInsight

Andromeda over Cape Byron Lighthouse

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Description

This is the Andromeda Galaxy over the Cape Byron Lighthouse, as it would have been at 3:58am on 20th July 2020.

Andromeda is about the same apparent length as the Small Magellanic Cloud, though much fainter and only visible to the naked eye under very dark skies.

The small magenta coloured patch to the left of the lighthouse is the Pacman Nebula, NGC 281.

Most of the sky consists of 53 tracked and stacked images which allows the detail in the galaxy to be brought out. The foreground is 10 untracked & stacked images to reduce image noise.

A separate stack of 7 tracked images was used to "patch" the sky either side of the lighthouse due to its lateral movement whilst the stars were tracked.

I used an astro-modified Canon 6D with a Sigma 85mm F/1.4 lens (at F/2.5) on the Star Adventurer EQ mount. All exposures were ISO 6400, 10 seconds. I manually triggered each image just after the light flashed (which has a 12 second cycle).

Sky images were stacked and pre-processed in AstroPixelProcessor. Ground images were stacked in Photoshop.

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Andromeda over Cape Byron Lighthouse, Kelvin Hennessy