This iconic island of 1 trillion stars, 2 million light years away, is simply gorgeous.

When I first bought my Seestar S50 smart telescope, I took a quick picture of the core of the Andromeda galaxy, and then forgot all about it as it largely disappears during Spring. Now that’s it’s popping back up again, I thought it was time to revisit.

There are a couple of challenges to photographing this with the S50. Not least of which is that it’s too big to fit in the S50’s field of view. You have to take several images of different parts and then patch them together.

I haven’t put a lot of effort into matching colours and orientation, so you can probably see the lines where the images overlap.

But this leads to the second problem. There are only about two hours of darkness this time of year. Each image takes about half an hour. With the inevitable overheads of setting up and checking that everything is OK, I just ran out of time before the first hint of dawn started to spoil the view. Which is why there’s a big black empty bit in the bottom left. In a few months time, Andromeda will be overhead for most of the night. All I need is one, long, moon free, cloud free, wind free, neighbours party free, night, and I’m hoping to get something much better.

The s50 has it’s own “mosaic mode”, where you can tell it to do it’s own patching of multiple images. It just about manages to do this in two hours over Andromeda.

Which isn’t bad, but I prefer my manual one. The automated one gives equal exposure to the whole image, whereas I can given more time to the fainter outer spiral arms.

Andromeda is quite easy to find at the moment.

Look northeast at midnight and find the “W” of Cassiopeia. Follow the right hand “V” down to a line of bright stars that form the Andromeda constellation. Where you hit Andromeda, there are three stars going up at a right angle. The Andromeda Galaxy is right at the top of those three. If you’re lucky enough to have a dark sky, then you might see something like this.

I need to use a camera to see this. This is a five minute exposure, iso 3200, f2.8, using a 35mm lens on a Panasonic GF7. If you are lucky enough to be able to see it, then I would love to see some photos.