08/31/2026
🌌 Welcome to the Andromeda Galaxy
DLCAstrophotography.Etsy.com
I've been working on this one for over a week. I collected so much data that my Intel i7 computer kept crashing during processing. ChatGPT tells me I need a serious upgrade to a gaming computer. 😂
I captured broadband data, which is primarily the light and dust from the countless stars within the galaxy, and I also captured narrowband data — Hydrogen Alpha (Ha) and Oxygen III (OIII) — which primarily reveals light from emission nebulae within the galaxy.
The data:
📷 Broadband (full spectrum): 9 hours, 20 minutes — 9.32 GB
🔭 Narrowband (3nm Ha & OIII): 23 hours, 10 minutes — 21.09 GB
⏱️ Total exposure: 32 hours, 30 minutes
And that's just the data coming off the camera. Once processing began:
💻 Broadband: 642 images — 116 GB
💻 Narrowband: 1,474 images — 230 GB
🗄️ Total processing requirements: 376.41 GB
So… after more than 32 hours of exposure, nearly 2,100 individual images, and hundreds of gigabytes of data, here is the result.
🌌 The Andromeda Galaxy — M31
Andromeda is one of the most incredible objects in the night sky because when you look at it, you're not just looking at a distant galaxy — you're looking into the deep past.
Andromeda is approximately 2.5 million light-years away, meaning the light captured in this image began its journey toward Earth roughly 2.5 million years ago. The photons hitting my camera traveled through space for millions of years before finally ending their journey here on Earth.
Andromeda is enormous. The visible portion of the galaxy stretches roughly 120,000–200,000 light-years across, depending on how its faint outer regions are measured. It contains hundreds of billions of stars, along with enormous clouds of gas and dust where new stars are being born.
And here's one of the wildest facts: Andromeda and the Milky Way are on a collision course. The two galaxies are being pulled toward each other by gravity and are expected to interact dramatically in roughly 4–5 billion years. They won't simply smash together like two solid objects — galaxies are mostly empty space — but their gravitational interaction will completely reshape both galaxies over time.
Eventually, the Milky Way and Andromeda are expected to merge into a single much larger galaxy. Astronomers sometimes refer to the predicted remnant as “Milkomeda.”
Even more amazing, Andromeda isn't traveling through an empty universe by itself. It is the largest galaxy in the Local Group, which includes the Milky Way, the Triangulum Galaxy, and dozens of smaller satellite galaxies.
And those little fuzzy structures surrounding Andromeda in deep images aren't just background objects. Some are dwarf galaxies gravitationally bound to Andromeda, while the enormous streams and faint structures around it are remnants of galaxies that Andromeda has interacted with or consumed over cosmic time.
The reddish regions visible in this image are particularly interesting. Those are areas of ionized hydrogen, tracing enormous stellar nurseries where new stars are forming. By combining the broadband and narrowband data, I was able to bring out structures that would be difficult to see in a conventional image of Andromeda.
So when you look at this photograph, you're seeing a galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars, located 2.5 million light-years away, with some of the light captured here having started its journey before modern humans even existed.
In other words…
You're not just looking at Andromeda. You're looking 2.5 million years into the past. 🌌✨
