This is the famous Andromeda Galaxy, M31, as seen from Pedernales Falls State Park on Wednesday, December 16th, 2020 and represents my first attempt at photographing a deep sky object. The photo was generated using 50 stacked 1 minute exposures through my Olympus 100-400mm lens with the camera mounted on a tracker. I’m happy to admit that this isn’t a great picture but it was fun to try and I’m pleasantly surprised by the amount of detail that I managed to pull out of the original frames.
Kudos to my partner in crime and astrophotography mentor Jason Flenniken for help finding the right patch of sky to point the camera at and in getting everything correctly aligned. Jason was using his fancy telescope that night and you can see his (very much better) M31 photo over on his Instagram page.
For the technically inclined...