The Andromeda Galaxy

M31 is the famous Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest large neighbor galaxy, forming the Local Group of galaxies together with its companions (including M32 and M110, two bright dwarf elliptical galaxies), our Milky Way galaxy and its companions, M33 and others.

Notice the faint bridge of material between M31 and it's companion galaxy M110 in the lower right quadrant.

This is our third attempt at M31.  For our first attempt (2004 image) we used RGB that was binned 2x2 and found that with the STL-11000M / FSQ106N combination the stars were seriously undersampled.  For our second attempt (2005 image) we used RGB that was binned 1x1 and got much better stars, but we needed more data. The starburst effect for the brighter stars in the 2005 version was achieved by using a cross wire dewcap that was made by Mike Rice at New Mexico Skies.

In 2006, we finally gathered enough data to make a reasonable FSQ image of M31.