The Andromeda Galaxy M31 a truly magnificent sight. It is the sister of our own galaxy and the closest major galaxy. Our Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, the Triangulum Galaxy M33 are members of the Local Group. M31 contains about 1 trillion stars, twice as many as our home galaxy. It’s not only one of the brightest Messier objects it is also quite large… six times the full moon in diameter.

This image is an LRGB composite taken at the Deep Sky West Observatory with more than 22 hours of exposure time in total. I only used ‘gentle’ manipulations during post processing and no noise reduction at all. The dark lanes show lots of structure and the blueish clusters are nicely visible. Maybe I will come back to this data and try some reprocessing to get more prominent Ha regions.