First view of Andromeda

It is now getting late enough in the year that the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) is visible in Bay Area skies at a reasonable time, and also not obscured by trees in my backyard. The constellation of Cassiopeia is prominent in the sky around 7pm and an easy sign-post to M31.

I took my first look at M31 a couple of nights ago through my lowest power eyepiece (Q70 38mm), which gives 73x in the CPC 1100. M31 is a very large object and so requires low power. Unfortunately this means that the background sky glow from light pollution is more pronounced - although not too bad on M31 as the object is so bright.

At 2.5 million light years, M31 is the the closest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way and contains almost 1 trillion stars. This galaxy will collide with ours in about 2.5 billion years. Andromeda has two "satellite" galaxies - M32 and M101. I was able to see both of these also.

The view at the eyepiece was very similar to the picture below - although the dark dust lanes weren't as pronounced.