One my very first astrophotography images was of the huge and bright Andromeda Galaxy also known as Messier 31. Since that image over a year ago I have acquired a better camera and learned how to autoguide my telescope mount in order to get longer exposures. So I decided to image it again and was blown away by this result. Andromeda is a massive spiral galaxy approximately 2.5 million light-years away and is the closest large galaxy to Earth. You can also see one of Andromeda's dwarf companion galaxies, M32, to the left of the core. M31 has roughly 1 trillion stars, double that in the Milky Way. Andromeda is hurtling in our direction and is expected to merge with the Milky Way in about 4.5 billion years. It is so big and bright that you can actually see it with the naked eye from a dark site this time of year up and to the right of Cassiopeia. It is the most distant object visible with the naked eye.

More fun facts: Andromeda is the largest of the galaxies in the Local Group of galaxies bound by together by gravity. The Milky Way is the second in size followed by the Triangulum Galaxy which will be the target of my next astrophoto. In addition to these three large galaxies there are dozens of small companion galaxies bound to the three large galaxies. The Milky Way is older at roughly 13.6 Billion years of age whereas Andromeda is about 10 Billion years old. It's like your younger brother that grows to be bigger than you. The Local Group joins several thousand other galaxies to form the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. And the Virgo Cluster is just one of about a hundred galaxy clusters in the Virgo Supercluster of galaxies. The latest estimate, based on data from NASA's New Horizons probe, is that there are roughly 200 billion galaxies in the universe.

To make this image I shot fifty 2-minute exposures through my Baader Neodymium Skyglow filter at 1630mm focal length (0.7X Reducer). I then calibrated these light frames with 20 each dark, flat, and dark flat frames. I stacked the frames with Astro Pixel Processor (APP) and post-processed with Photoshop utilizing the StarXTerminator, Astronomy Tools, and Topaz DeNoise AI plugins. I used a new channel assignment routine in APP that allowed me to isolate and enhance the blue colors in the outskirts of Andromeda.