M31 - Andromeda Galaxy

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M31 - Andromeda Galaxy

Andromeda is the nearest galaxy to our own and is believed to resemble our own Milky Way Galaxy. The larger stars that you see in the photo are acually stars in our own galaxy.  M31 is about two million light years away.  It contains billions of stars.  The arms of the galaxy that looks like gases is actually stars.  They are so far away they appear as gases.  Andromeda is nearly the diameter of the Moon in width.  It can be seen by the naked eye at a dark location and looks like a 'fuzzy' object.  The center is acutally made up of two different molecular clouds.  How this came about is still a mystery.

Because this galaxy is so large, I resulted to using a 300mm Nikon lense.  I mounted the lense onto my cold camera (ST8XE) and then piggy backed the camera and lense on top of my telescope.  I had a real difficult time processing the four images (luminance, red, green, blue).  The lumnance image had star diameters that were twice as large as the green and blue channels.  The red channel was also twice as large.  It may have been due to the difficulty to focusing a short focal length lense or chromatic abberation.

Date:  12-14-04

Telescope: 300mm Nikon Lense mounted on top of scope        Camera:ST8XE

Mount: Astrophysics 900 Goto

Exposure Time: LRGB 40min ;24min;24min;24min; 2x2bin

Processing: Maxim, Adobe combined