Our closest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy is about 2.5 million light years away from us and contains roughly a trillion stars.  The luminescence that we can see is the collective glow of these stars.  All of the actual stars that are visible in this image are stars in our own galaxy that we are looking through to see the distant Andromeda.   If you explore the image closely you can see many very distant galaxies in the background that are millions of light years beyond Andromeda.  The bright red areas in the galaxy are massive areas of nebulosity where new stars are being formed.  The Milky Way and Andromeda are on a collision course approaching each other at about 63 miles per second.  In about 4 billion years the two galaxies will merge.

The desire to take a picture of Andromeda with my own equipment was one of the primary catalysts that got me into astrophotgraphy.  It was one year ago when I took my first M31 image from my Bortle 8 backyard using  my FSQ-85 paired with my ASI6200MC color camera and an L-Pro light pollution filter.  I was pretty happy with the result at the time.  You can find that image in my gallery. 

In November of 2022 I managed to get to a Bortle 1 site in the Bahamas on a family vacation.  I had to battle persistent wind, clouds and the need to get some sleep.  After all, it was a family vacation first!    I managed to complete three targets during the week I was there.  The other two, B10 and NGC1333 are in my gallery already. 

I thought it would be fun to try M31 again but this time with my mono camera, FSQ-106 and zero light pollution.  Most of my imaging tends to be narrow band due to my light polluted skies and as a result I have little galaxy processing experience.  Needless to say there was a lot of trial and error in this processing project.

I was able to capture 8 hours of data on this image over three nights.  I knew I could collect the Ha data from home with little negative impact from the light pollution so I did not waste valuable dark sky time collecting narrow band data.  Therefore, the Ha data was captured about a month after the narrow band data from my back yard.

Hope you like the result!