Photo of the Week for October 13, 2017
The Andromeda Galaxy, also known as M31, is one of the autumn sky’s finest and best known attractions—both for visual observers and astrophotographers. At a distance of 2.5 million light years, the Andromeda spiral is the Milky Way’s nearest large neighbour. Indeed, you can think of M31 as our galaxy’s bigger brother—it’s twice as large and likely has far more than double the number of stars.
This M31 portrait was captured during September by Ontario imager Doug Nan Jiang. He acquired a total of 14½ hours image data through L, R,G and B filters with a QHYCCD 814 A camera and Kowa 500mm f/5.6 telephoto lens, reduced to 350mm focal length.