BACKYARD SPACE IN JOHNSTON: M31 The Andromeda Galaxy

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Andromeda is the closest galaxy to our own Milky Way and is 2.5 Million Light-Years away from Earth. It contains an estimated 1 Trillion stars and spans 220,000 Light-Years. In 964, a persian astronomer by the name of Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi discovered Andromeda and noted it as “A Nebulous Smear”. In 1785, Charles Messier cataloged it as M31, Andromeda.

This past weekend celebrated one full year of picking up Astrophotography as a hobby. I have learned a lot along the way and have met many new friends both local and cross continental that love all things astronomy. I look forward to sharing all of my images, and am eager to improve my skills and take better astro photos.

This past weekend I was able to set up after a Month of not imaging. I set my scope to my first Deep space target from last year, M31. Because I shoot with a Monochrome (Black and White) camera, I need to shoot through different filters to capture different wavelengths of light. For M31, I used my Luminance (UV/IR - all visible light), Red, Green, and Blue filters to create an LRGB image. It took me two nights to gather all of the images needed to stack them together and used an astronomical image editing software to calibrate, stack, and edit my image to bring out all of the detail.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lucas “Luc” Maguire captured this image from his backyard in Johnston. He will be submitting his deep space images to the Sun Rise for publication each week. Maguire’s photography can also be found at his Instagram account @oceanstateastro and his Twitter feed @OceanStateAstro.

(Image courtesy Luc Maguire)

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