One day the galaxy will look like this without a telescope!

Welcome to Andromeda Galaxy M31. It's bigger than our Milky Way and heading in our direction...though, at a leisurely pace of 60 miles per second. On the other hand, the speed will pick up as it gets closer. The black holes in the middle of these two galaxies are drawn to each other. The consequence is certain.

At the moment, the galaxy is 2.5 million light years away. As large a distance as that sounds, the leviathan is really close by. In our sky, M31 is as wide as four full moons. We just don't notice because its light is very weak after traveling so far. 

On really clear nights, Andromeda can barely be made out with our eyes, though it just looks like a faint smudge. My scope tracked Andromeda across the sky for 9 hours to collect enough light to give us this better view.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in this image. The bright nucleus is the first thing I notice. The galaxy has a super-massive black hole in the center that is pulling in celestial material with its intense gravity. The black hole tries to engorge itself on everything, but some is shunted out of the poles, spinning out to form spirals. I see dark stuff like dust, ash, heavy elements, and molecular compounds. The blue areas are young stars that burn really hot. There are so many of them that they just blend together to create the colored fog in the image.

(Any individual stars in this image are our own. We have to look beyond them to see deeper into space.)

Andromeda also has hydrogen nebulae just like ours. All along the spirals are splotches of magenta and red...interstellar hydrogen gas that has condensed in places to create new stars, which, in turn, ionize the remaining hydrogen clouds, causing them to glow.

Of course, none of us will be around when our two galaxies merge. Other than presenting quite a different view out the kitchen window, the event will likely cause Earth no harm. In reality, there is so much space between objects in a galaxy that there won't be many collisions.

Right?

Perhaps acknowledging any anxiety over the pending encounter, tonight's processing was accompanied by e.s.t. Esbjörn Svensson Trio's 𝘛𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘛𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘪𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯.