Discover our magnificent next door neighbor in the universe the Andromeda Galaxy  M31 so you can print it and frame it at home or as a gift to a loved one! We will send you the image in high definition in .jpg and .png format so that you can do with it what you want (frame, offer, make a postcard or greeting card).
 
This galaxy is a collection of 300 billion stars and is located 2.5 million light years from us, making it our closest neighbor. Very bright and large, it is visible to the naked eye on sufficiently dark summer nights. It then appears as a milky spot in the sky almost 6 times larger than the full moon.
 
The image, captured in color, was created by creating a mosaic of four panels. Indeed, its impressive size prevents it from fitting into a photo and it took four photographs combined for it to fit in the frame. Mosaic creation is common in astrophotography and we dedicated lesson #13 to this process.
 
It was long considered to be a nebula because of its appearance until the 1920s when its definitively galactic nature was recognized by astronomers. In addition, Andromeda would be a relatively young galaxy since it would be less than three billion years old, i.e. at a time when the Earth already existed. According to various studies, it would be the result of a collision between two galaxies.
 
As with planets, galaxies have satellite galaxies that orbit around them. Andromeda has nearly twenty of them while others, like the Triangle galaxy, do not have any.
 
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