M31 is probably the largest deep-sky object in our skies, over three times as large as the full moon. It is also our closest neighbor, and is fairly similar to our own Milky Way galaxy. It's still early in the year for this one; I just happened to be up an hour before dawn and managed to grab about 10 minutes worth of photons, and it's not a spectacular image. The disc of the galaxy is easily seen in most photographs to encompass the large globular cluster at the bottom of this picture (M32.) This is an uncropped photo; I would need to make a mosaic of at least three shots to include the entire galaxy. The bright core here is easy to find with binoculars in even a polluted sky, and can be seen by eye alone by many people in dark skies. However, the rest of the disk is relatively faint. In this shot, the main dust lane closest to the core is pretty obvious; less so is the larger band of dark dust further out, simply because I didn't get enough starlight for it to stand out. The color balance is a horrorshow as well. Ultimately, using large numbers of short exposures is not in any way a substitute for long exposures, and when there are only a few shots to stack, the flaws in the technique are pretty obvious. I'm uploading this shot merely as a baseline; I have never tried shooting it before, so this is what I have to build on once it's within range a little earlier in the night, during August and September.
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