M31 - The Great Andromeda Galaxy

Andromeda is the nearest large galaxy neighbor, at 2.4~2.9 million light years away. It large and bright enough to be seen with the naked eye even in skies that aren't so dark, like mine. It is a challenging object for amateur astrophotographers because it is very "dusty" and the core is so bright that it easily washes out in longer exposures. It is difficult to see the spiral structure of the galaxy.

On 14 September, 2004, I began making a mosaic of the galaxy. The results are below, in several versions.

1.  Aggressively processed mosaic. I pushed the "curves" in photoshop as much as I could, burning out the core but bring out details in the cloud structure.

2. "Mildly" processed mosaic. I tried to maintain some definition in the core here, but lost details in the dust lanes.

3.  Detail of core, with a slight RGB layer added from my color SC2.5 cam.