11/10/05 M31 The Andromeda Galaxy

The huge apparent size of Andromeda has made it a target I've stayed away from until now. The small field of view of the LX200 would require a mosaic of too many sub-frames for me to even consider it. However, I am now the proud owner of a wonderful Takahashi FC-60 refractor giving me a nice wide field of view to play with! This is the first light image for me using this scope and I'm very pleased. It was taken under a gibbous Moon but the gradients weren't too bad, not much bloating and very little coma on the edges. It's going to be fun shooting wide field shots! I've listed the image as F9 because I had to use two 25mm spacers in order to reach focus. That makes the overall focal length 550mm, the image scale is around 3.37 arcsec per pixel.