Andromeda,our nearest neighbor galaxy, in all its glory!

Jaw-dropping Andromeda galaxy photo comprises 37 hours of exposure, originally appeared on CNET.com
This image was taken from earth by a pair of "backyard" astrophotographers who collaborated to produce a stunning image of our nearest galactic neighbour.www.cnet.com

Michelle Starr
September 24, 2015


It has been the focus of a lot of attention. Its proximity makes it brilliant for studying spiral galaxy construction, which helps understand our own spiral galaxy. Space telescopes such as the Hubble and the Spitzer have spent a lot of time photographing it, and we've seen it in many forms: infrared, false-colour composite, even enormously high-resolution at 1.5 billion pixels.
the Spitzer Space Telescope revealed that Andromeda contains one trillion stars 1,000,000,000,000 =10^12
: at least twice the number of stars in the Milky Way, which is estimated to be 200–400 billion.

We can't, for obvious reasons, take photos of our own Milky Way galaxy within which we are embedded.
Luckily, our closest major galactic neighbour, the Andromeda Galaxy, at 2.5 million light-years away in the constellation of Andromeda, 220,000 light years across, it is the largest galaxy of the Local Group,
The image you see here, showing the Andromeda Galaxy in visible light, was captured and processed by two astrophotographers right here on Earth, US-based David Lane and Finland-based J-P Metsavainio.
Using a STL-11000M, 35mm format, 11-megapixel CCD Camera by SBIG coupled with a William Optics Gran Turismo 81 telescope, data collection was Lane's contribution. For 37 hours (non-consecutive), he trained camera and telescope at the tiny section of sky wherein the Andromeda Galaxy lies. He shot 18 hours of visible light exposure, one hour through a hydrogen alpha filter to pick out ionised hydrogen details and six hours each with a red, green and blue filter.

The raw images obtained from these exposures were then sent to Metsavainio, who corrected the optical distortion caused by the telescope using CCDStack 2software. He then combined the images and adjusted the levels and curves using PhotoShop CS3. This is similar to the processing applied to images obtained from space telescopes.The resulting image shows Andromeda in all her glory.



The Andromeda Galaxy(also known as Messier 31)is a lot bigger than the Milky Way. It contains around a trillion stars, compared with the Milky Way's estimated 200 billion to 400 billion stars. It also measures around 220,000 light-years in diameter, compared with the Milky Way's 100,000 light-years.
The Andromeda Galaxy is estimated to be 1.5×1012 solar masses,[7] while the mass of the Milky Way is estimated to be 8.5×1011 solar masses.

Because it's so big and so close, it's one of the brightest Messier objects in the night sky and can be seen with the naked eye on a moonless night from a dark location.

Here's its size relative to the moon as seen from Earth. Given that it's so much farther away, you can start to get some idea of how massive it is.Fun fact: The Andromeda Galaxy is moving through space at a rate of around 400,000 kph (250,000 mph)... directly toward the Milky Way. In roughly four billion years, the two are going to meet in a galactic collision of epic proportions, and probably merge into a giant super-galaxy.