The nearest proper galaxy to us, the Andromeda Galaxy, is a very large and bright object in the autumn sky. It’s visible with the naked eye outside of the city, and it spans about 2.8 degrees in the sky, making it appear six times larger than the full moon. It still does not fit in the frame of my widefield telescope. It is careening towards the Milky Way at around 68 miles per second, but the two won’t meet for another five billion years since it is 2.5 million light years away. There are two dwarf elliptical galaxies orbiting Andromeda: Messier 32 just underneath center in the image, and Messier 110 just above and right of center.
This image is composed of 436 three-minute subexposures that were taken over the course of five nights, giving a total exposure of almost 22 hours. Processing included the NoiseXTerminator PixInsight process, and I also purchased the StarXTerminator process. Both are phenomenal tools and really let me push the data and highlight the desired object. The star removal of StarXTerminator is significantly better than Starnet++, especially for large stars. My star color recovery method worked well on all of the clipped stars. The ASI294MC camera is a great fit for this telescope and is quite sensitive, I am very pleased with this camera over my Nikon D5300. I just need to work on fine tuning the corrector backspacing to get better stars near the edges.
