| NOTES |
DATE:
|
Thursday, September 28 - Friday, September 29, 2006
|
TIME:
|
10:41 pm - 1:28 am EDT |
| CAMERA: |
Canon
EOS 300D Digital Rebel (unmodified)
|
EXPOSURE:
|
2 hours (24 x 5 minutes) @ ISO 800 |
LOCATION:
|
Owl
Observatory - Kalamazoo
Nature Center |
INSTRUMENT:
|
Tele Vue Pronto 70 mm refractor (with Focal Reducer/Field
Flattener) piggybacked on 12" LX200. |
PROCESSING:
|
Images obtained with DSLRFocus 3.
Registered, aligned, stacked, and dark frame subtracted with Deep Sky
Stacker. Further processing done with
Adobe Photoshop 7.0 |
COMMENTS:
|
The
Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is the sister galaxy
to our own Milky Way. Lying 14º to the
northeast of Alpheratz, the upper-left star of the Great Square of
Pegasus, it
appears as a 3º detached cloud of the Milky Way. Best
estimates put M31’s distance at 2.5
million light-years. Using its distance,
angular size, and some simple trigonometry gives a diameter of
approximately
170,000 light-years! Depending on what
book you read, M31 has between 200 million and 1 trillion stars!
Also visible in the image are two of
Andromeda’s two dwarf elliptical galaxies.
Closest to the disk of Andromeda is M32 and further out is NGC 205 or
M110. |
|
