About 2-1/2 million light years away, the Andromeda Galaxy is the closest galaxy to our Milky Way, and it is getting closer to us by the minute - it is expected to collide with the Milky Way galaxy in 4 or 5 billion years.

Visible to the unaided eye from areas with dark skies, the width of the Andromeda galaxy appears from Earth to be about three degrees, or six times as wide as the full moon.

Above M31 in this image you can see the dwarf elliptical galaxy designated M110, a companion galaxy of M31. Charles Messier was able to see M110 in 1764 when he cataloged the Andromeda galaxy as the 31st object in his famous list. He included it in his sketch of M31 made at that time, but he did not assign a separate number to this small elliptical galaxy. It was not until 1967 that Kenneth Jones suggested adding M110 to Messier's famous list of 109 deep sky objects.

Visible near the bottom edge of M31 and a little to the right of the center line in this image is the compact elliptical galaxy designated M32. Obviously Messier also saw this small, bright companion galaxy in 1764 and added it to his catalog at that time.

This image of M31 was created from 55 three minute exposures, processed with dark frames, flat frames and flat-dark frames, all acquired with a ZWO ASI071MC Pro camera attached to a William Optics FluoroStar 91 telescope on the night of 26-Sep-2022. Image acquisition was performed with N.I.N.A. software. The Atlas EQ-6 mount was guided with a ZWO ASI224MC camera on a 60mm f/4 guide scope, using PHD2 software. All image processing was done with PixInsight.