English: Pictured above is a True Color photograph of the "Great Andromeda Galaxy" and its 2 satellite galaxies, M32 above and M110 below. The Andromeda Galaxy is the largest member of the "Local Group" followed by the Milky Way and the Triangulum Galaxy with a diameter of around 152,000 lightyears and an estimated star count of around 1 trillion. The Andromeda Galaxy has been known since ancient times. The first mention of the galaxy was in the year 964 AD by the Persian astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi. He described the Andromeda Galaxy in his Book of Fixed Stars as a "nebulous smear" or "small cloud." in 1925, Edwin Hubble identified Cepheid variable stars for the first time in Andromeda which proved and settled the debate between Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis (started 5 years before) that the so called "Andromeda Nebula" is in fact its own separate galaxy outside of the Milky Way. This discovery in turn expanded our knowledge on just how big the universe is. We now know of course that the Andromeda Galaxy is one of as many as 2 trillion or more galaxies in the observable Universe. Scientists have discovered the Andromeda Galaxy is blue shifted, and is headed towards the Milky Way at a speed of 110 km/s. They've projected the Milky Way and Andromeda have about a 50% chance of colliding in the next 5 billion years.

I captured this galaxy with a consumer grade SkyWatcher Evostar 72ED refracting telescope and a full spectrum modified Nikon D5300 Digital SLR camera with an external UV-IR cut filter placed in front to cut down on "star bloat" all mounted on a Celestron Advanced VX tracking mount. I captured it under Bortle 2 skies at a star party that was being hosted from September 19-21st 2025 at the historic Ocqueoc Outdoor Center in Ocqueoc, Michigan. This is a multi-night capture with imaging starting on the 18th of September and ending on the 20th of September 2025. In total, 9 hours of data was captured with each individual "sub frame" being a 2 minute exposure which were each calibrated with Flat, Dark, and Bias Frames. Each calibration frame does a seperate thing to the data, Flats calibrate for Vignetting and Dust in the data, Darks calibrate for "Hot Pixels," and Biases calibrate for "Amp Glow" caused by heat and near-infrared light emitted by circuitry surrounding the camera sensor. On top of the about 8.5 hours of 2 minute sub exposures, a separate sequence of 30 second exposures were captured of the Andromeda Galaxy which were used to prevent the cores of the Andromeda Galaxy and the satellite galaxy M32 from being "blown out."

I first started by taking the data and running it through Sirilic which uses a technique called "Image Stacking" by taking each sub exposure and layers them to average out the noise in the image in turn creating a stacked image which has reduced noise and reveals faint detail a sub exposure could never. After Sirilic finished, I took the stacked result into Graxpert to crop and to denoise the data further. I then took the data into Siril and ran a process called SpectralPhotometricColorCalibration which analyzes the stars in the data and compares them with data taken by the GAIA spacecraft to ensure a true color representation. I then stacked my "Core data" and merged it with the "Galaxy data" to create an "HDR Core." I then stretched out the histogram to reveal the galaxy. I then ran a process called StarNet++ which removes the stars in the data to make it easier to process the galaxy without having to worry about how the stars look. I then took the "stretched" image into GIMP where I began to color the galaxy using the Hue-Saturation tool avaliable. After doing multiple runs through Hue-Saturation, I finally got the colors I was looking for. I then recombined the base stars with the colored galaxy to get the final image above.