For a while I have wanted to take an image of M31 using the new(ish) telescope. It’s a great target, and has always impressed me because I know its real size on the sky – it’s really about 3 degrees – or six full Moons – across! We can just about see the tiny brightest part of the nucleus with the naked eye in a dark sky; with binoculars it’s a bit bigger, and in a photograph you start to see its true size. To me it was most spectacular on a thin glass plate image taken with the Schmidt telescope at the Palomar observatory, when I was using photographs like that as a professional astronomer.
This is very much a first try. It is a stack from just three 30 second exposures at prime focus of my 500mm f/5 telescope, ISO 1600. It’s cropped to square, and has a bit of colour curve processing to increase the colour saturation. I had real difficulty getting the alt-az mount aligned (not helped by bright lights at eye level around the field where I was working) and from a sequence of nearly 50 images only a few were untrailed (even though quite a few had very small trails). Next time I will do better!
