Daily Telescope: A closer look at the most-distant object visible to the naked eye

Enlarge / The Andromeda Galaxy, as seen from The Milky Way Galaxy. (credit: Kevin Chernoff)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light—a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We’ll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we’ll take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It is October 25, and today’s image features one of the most photogenic galaxies from Earth’s vantage point—the Andromeda Galaxy.

This photo was captured by an astrophotographer named Kevin Chernoff using a 6-inch reflector telescope on a tracking mount. According to Chernoff, this was an astrophotography-modified, mirrorless camera without any special filters. “It is about two and a half hours of total exposure time across 300 individual frames, stacked and processed together,” he said. “It was shot from a dark roadside location about an hour away from my home.”