The galaxies are aligned!!
This is the best photo I’ve made of the Andromeda galaxy!
It’s my second time stacking pictures to bring out faint details. You’re looking at 20 phone pics taken through my 3D printed telescope, each 1/2s exposure so the Earth didn’t rotate as much during the photo and smear the stars. I tried the program deepskystacker, but it failed to stack my pictures (maybe my phone camera’s pics had too much noise?) so over 3 days I wrote some custom python code using astropy and astroalign to stack them myself!
Look at all those dim stars! That’s so many stars! In the bottom right that slightly fuzzy star is actually the core of M31’s satellite galaxy M110! I was hoping to see some dust lines or spiral arms, but I guess I’ll need more data for that.