Say hello to the neighbours

After some success with photographing both the moon and the M57 Ring Nebula, I thought I’d have a go at another one of the more photographed ‘deep sky’ objects.  Introducing the M31 Andromeda Galaxy, one of our galactic neighbours in space.  Forming part of our own ‘Local Group’ of galaxies, M31 is very similar to our own Milky Way, both being spiral type galaxies.

M31 Andromeda, 17th Nov 2011
M31 Andromeda, 17th Nov 2011

As an additional bonus, M110 Andromeda just makes the bottom left of frame, and M32 Andromeda is just about trying to make an appearance at the top centre.  So there you go – three for the price of one!  I’m pretty pleased with this, as the level of detail was more than I was expecting, and more than can be seen in the scope, in particular the spiral ‘dust lanes’.

M31 has the distinction of being the most distant object that can be seen with the naked eye (at least if you don’t live in the South East!) at some 2.5 million light years away.  Did you know you could see that far?  Go and try – find the ‘square’ of Pegasus (currently fairly high in the south and moving west), then follow the ‘tail’ of stars leading away to the left from the top left of that square.  Go along the tail for two stars, then up one, and you will get to the region of sky with M31.  Here’s a more detailed series of finder charts.  In rural areas this is easily visible with the naked eye as a white smudge (I can verify this from when I was on holiday in Devon!).  Alas from St. Albans it needs at least binoculars.

According to Wikipedia, recent observations of M31 suggest it contains at least 1 trillion stars (that’s a 10 with 12 zeros), compared to our own Milky Way’s mere 200-400 billion.  All this contained in one tiny smudge of light in the sky, that is part of a cluster of galaxies which in turn is part of a super-cluster, and that there are millions of super-clusters.  A project for the future will be to photograph the Virgo Cluster.  According to the star charts there should be a good chance of capturing a handful or more galaxies in one photograph.  Unfortunately Virgo is not high enough in the sky until at Spring.

Imaging Data:

Canon EOS 300D at prime focus
13 x 120 second unguided sub-exposures giving a total of 26 mins exposure
For calibration/noise reduction:
8 dark frames
7 flat frames shot at twilight
6 bias/offset frames
all stacked in DeepSkyStacker
Levels, curves, saturation adjustment in DeepSkyStacker