This beautiful edge-on spiral galaxy, about 30 million light years away, can be seen in the vicinity of the constellation Andromeda. With the complex structure of the dust in its disk, this galaxy is sometimes considered a twin of our Milky Way. It's a challenging visual target for small telescopes, unless the sky is very dark, because the bright central regions of its spiral arms are hidden by dust. This horizontal lane of dust shows delicate, fine structure that may be the result of supernova explosions.

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Date:
October 16, 2009
Location:
Ft. McKavett State Historic Site, Texas
Telescope:
Astro-Tech 6" Ritchey-Chretien at f/9 1370mm focal length
Mount:
Takahashi EM-11 Temma 2, guided by an SBIG ST-237 thru an E-finder at 100mm focal length
Camera:
Orion Star Shoot Pro v.2
Camera Control and Focusing:
MaxIm DL Essentials
Exposures:
37 images at 6 mins each at prime focus
Total Exposure time:
3 hours 42 minutes
Processing:
Converted, calibrated, de-bayered, normalized, aligned and MinMax combined
using Automatic Image Set Processing and deconvolution in IP.
Final processing in Photoshop CS2

To see largest size available, click on "Original" below