Originally cataloged as a nebula by Messier with the designation M 31. Actually it is a barred spiral galaxy, similar to our won milky way, which is also a barred spiral galaxy. It is our closest major galaxy neighbor , but even then it is still at a distance of 2 million light years. Our own galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are on a collision course. Not to worry though because the collision is expected over 4 - 5 billion years.
The Andromeda galaxy has a diameter of 152,000 lightyears. So it is considerably larger than our own milky way, which measures only about 90,000 lightyears in diameter. It has two satellite galaxies, M32 (near the bottom in the image) and M101 (top right); both are visible in the image.
Because of the large apparent size of this galaxy I have chosen the Canary Two Ultra Wide Field refractor telescope for this image. In total I scheduled 16 missions, all successful. So the total exposure is 800 seconds for the Luminance channel and 320 seconds for each of the color channels. In total almost 30 minutes.
Processing is done in PixInsight.
Click on the image for a larger version