NASA News · September 27, 2026
APOD: 2026 September 27 – Andromeda Before Photoshop
Where it is in your sky
- Object
- M 31 · Andromeda Galaxy · Galaxy
- Constellation
- Andromeda
- Best seen
- Evenings from July to December; highest at midnight in October
- Climbs above 20°
- From 29° S to the North Pole
- Never rises
- South of 49° S
- What you need
- Naked eye, from a dark site
Tonight from your location
From the source
What does the Andromeda galaxy really look like? The featured before 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 during 2019. Obvious image deficiencies include bright parallel airplane trails, long and continuous satellite trails, short cosmic ray streaks, and bad pixels. In the after image, 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.
APOD’s email for image submissions has changed. Please see: APOD Submissions APOD’s main NASA site is moving: From apod.nasa.gov to science.nasa.gov/apod Tomorrow’s picture: cosmic latte
From NASA News.
