Andromeda before Photoshop
			
		
		
			Image Credit:  
Kees Scherer
		
		
			What does the Andromeda galaxy really look like?
The 
featured image shows how our 
Milky Way Galaxy's closest major 
galactic neighbor really appears in a long exposure through 
Earth's busy skies and with a digital camera that introduces normal imperfections. 
The picture is a stack of 223 images, each a 300 second exposure, 
taken from a garden observatory in 
Portugal over the past year. 
Obvious image deficiencies include bright parallel 
airplane trails, long and continuous 
satellite trails, short 
cosmic ray streaks, and 
bad pixels. 
These imperfections were actually not removed with 
Photoshop 
specifically, but rather 
greatly reduced 
with a series of computer software packages that included 
Astro Pixel Processor, DeepSkyStacker, and PixInsight. 
All of this work was done not to 
deceive you with a 
digital fantasy 
that has little to do with the real likeness of the 
Andromeda galaxy (M31), 
but to minimize Earthly artifacts that have nothing 
to do with the distant galaxy and so better recreate 
what M31 really does look like.