Deep Sky Astrophotography
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Andromeda Galaxy, our future neighbor
The Andromeda Galaxy is with its distance of 2.5 million light years the most remote object, that still is visible to the naked eye - provided that you are in a dark location, away from big cities that more and more pollute the night sky with the glow of their lights.
This galaxy is also referred to as “M 31”, as it is the 31st object that made it into Charles Messier's list of deep sky objects, first published in 1771.
The Andromeda Galaxy pretty much resembles to our own galaxy, the Milky Way. With a diameter of approximately 200.000 light years, Andromeda is about double the size of our Milky Way.
It is assumed, that Andromeda contains around one trillion of stars (or one billion stars in British English or German, or one million millions in all three languages ;)
For quite a while in our past it was assumed that our Milky Way is the only galaxy and that Andromeda is just a part of it. Observing Andromeda triggered a century ago the understanding, that our Milky Way is far less exclusive: there are many billions of galaxies out there, each containing millions or billions of stars. Fun fact: in some future, Milky Way and Andromeda will truly become one galaxy, as Andromeda is approaching us with 266 km or 165 miles per second! But no need to duck your head yet: being 2.5 million light years away, Andromeda will need 4 – 10 billion years until uniting with our Milky Way and becoming our neighbor.
Now the nerdy part: the image was taken over several nights, summing up to 19 hours of collecting light. The imaging was done with a Newtonian Telescope of 430 mm focal length and a cooled 12 bit astronomy camera, using an UV-/IR-cut-filter, as well as filters for red, green and blue. Due to the use of a hydrogen-alpha-filter, justice could be done to the red hydrogen clouds, which love to play hide and seek, despite being scattered as small freckles all over in the outskirts of Andromeda ;)
