Being such bright and big makes the M31 a very popular target for
astrophotographers. It is quite easy to capture at last its bright
central parts. On the other side, large angular size and high surface
brightness allows capturing of tremendous details when the image is
done with the same care like images of much dimmer objects.
The portrait of M31 above was acquired by Martin Myslivec with his
G3-16200 camera on 30 cm corrected Newtonian telescope. The image is
in fact a mosaic of two fields (we already mentioned M31 is big).
Total exposure time of each field was 27.5 hours, so Martin needed 55
hours of exposures to obtain this big and very detailed M31
portrait.
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