Andromeda Galaxy – Photos Show Effect of Our Light-polluted Skies

Here are two photos of the great Andromeda Galaxy that I took with my telescope. The top photo was taken under a completely dark sky in northern Maine in 2021 and the second photo was taken from my backyard in Southern California, near LA, in 2023. The Maine photo was a single 30-sec exposure. The backyard photo took about 21 hours of exposures – about 1260 individually stacked 60-second exposures! I had to take that many photos to overcome the light-pollution in Southern California.

The bottom photo shows the telescope I used: A William Optics Zenithstar 61mm f/6 refractor (see photo below).

The Andromeda Galaxy means a lot to me, for a couple of reasons: One, it is the closest galaxy to us yet 2-1/2 million lightyears away; also it is a spiral galaxy, like our own. More recently this galaxy has taken on a new meaning for me: Without the work of a largely unrecognized woman astronomer in the early 20th Century well-known scientists such as Einstein and Hubble would not have changed their opinion that the Andromeda was simply part of our galaxy. Henrietta Leavitt’s work made possible our current knowledge of the expanding universe. She should have gotten a Nobel prize for her work but they didn’t award women the prize in her day.

You can see a photo of Ms. Leavitt and a more complete story here.

Check out my latest sci-fi novel, Remnant: Beyond Galactic Empire on my Books Page.