This object is the beautiful and massive Andromeda Galaxy, located only 2.5 million light years from earth in the constellation of its own name. It is the closest spiral galaxy to us and the farthest object that we can see with our naked eye.
Its apparent size is about 6 times the width of our full moon. The disk contains many billions of suns. The massive black hole at the center of the galaxy is not visible. NGC206, the brightest star cloud in the galaxy, is visible at lower right. Two satellite galaxies are in the same view - M110 to the upper right and M32 to the lower left.
Similar to my recent
M33 post, this image was a bit of an experiment. I was happy with the
Tak 85 image of M31 that I captured back in 2020 and I wanted to see how the RASA result would compare using the same camera.
The Tak 85 image has 3x the integration time. Based on the relative focal ratios (2.2 vs. 5.4), the RASA gathers light 6x faster. The image scale for the Tak 85 is 1.70 and for the RASA 11 is 1.25.
Revision B shows the comparison. The results are very similar. I see minor differences but both images are of similar quality in my opinion.
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