Andromeda Galaxy, Sep’25

For this autumn, I actually had a big goal: finally capturing the Andromeda Galaxy with a full-frame camera and collecting a massive amount of photons.

I did my first imaging session in September. Unfortunately, the night didn’t go too well – guiding was often around 1 arcsecond. On top of that, there wasn’t a single clear, usable night until the end of October. By then, I had almost forgotten about those 5.5 hours of data.

As part of my regular object posts, it was time for the Andromeda Galaxy, and I thought it might be a good opportunity to test my current workflow on the 2021 data. That workflow has already brought significant improvements to other images. Just then it occurred to me that I could combine the RGB data from 2021 with the luminance data from 2025.

The 2021 data was captured with my old, long-sold Vixen ED80sf and an APS-C sensor. The star colors and quality left a lot to be desired – but with BlurX Terminator, that’s manageable.

In the workflow, I registered the mono full-frame luminance data to the RGB APS-C data. The RGB data was developed using drizzle integration.

The Imaging Sessions

The session from 2021 when I collected the RGB data: Andromedagalaxy, Nov’21

The 2025 session was actually meant to be the start of a large Andromeda project. But due to poor guiding that night and six weeks of bad weather afterwards, I was more than happy to use the data for this intermediate project instead.
Who knows – maybe there will still be a stretch of clear skies for my 2025 Andromeda project.

High-resolution on Astrobin:

The annotated image:

Session Details: