I thought it would be nice to have another go at photographing the Andromeda Galaxy as best I could. I took this shot with a 200mm f/2.8 prime lens. Normally at this focal length you would only be able to expose for just over a second before the stars would start trailing; however, for the first time, I used a celestial tracker that slowly moves the camera with the sky so that the night sky would appear to stay exactly still as far as the camera was concerned. This meant I could expose this photograph as long as I wanted, which in this case was for 45s.
After taking approximately a hundred shots at various settings and ensuring the focus was pin sharp, this turned out to be the best image at the end of the evening. And with a little adjustment to the brilliance, contrast and black point levels in the light balance options, this was the result - amazing!
The Andromeda Galaxy is the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way galaxy. It is 2.5 million light-years from Earth, and contains approximately one trillion stars, more than twice the amount of the Milky Way. It is the furthest object that we can see with the naked eye in the night sky, and even then, you need to be looking up on a very dark night, from a very dark site, to see what is just a very faint distant smudge. But this spiral galaxy is as wide as the full moon in terms of its apparent size in the sky, so you don't actually need a lot of magnification to observe or photograph it.
The little smudge upper left of centre is the M110 dwarf elliptical galaxy which is a satellite galaxy of Andromeda (M31), as is M32 the bright dot right of centre.
Canon 200D 200mm f/2.8 (@ f/3.5) 45s ISO1600
