In the last couple of nights, having been kissed by the clemency of the gods that govern the movements of the clouds (petty gods, you know: they will know when you buy new equipment, and they will be jealous and unleash their wrath upon you), I have managed three hours and forty-five minutes on M31, our neighbor galaxy which has set its four hundred billion eyes on us, and will eventually engage in a dramatic collision with our own galaxy in a few billion years. Well, not such a dramatic one, actually, so don’t waste too many energies embracing for impact: during galactic merges, very few stars actually collide, if any. Although it would be enough if an alien star swung close enough to our solar system, to send these tiny rocks we call planets off to places well outside their regular orbits, in the interstellar void.
But I digress. Three hours and forty-five minutes is the time in which the sensor of my camera has been staring at M31. I plan to do a few more hours tonight, should the gods be merciful again, and there’s a lot more post-processing involved if I want to get some decent results: I’m yet to subtract dark and flat frames.