Imaging the Local Group

How to capture our nearby ‘island universes’

We live in amazing times, where smartphones can take images of the constellations and pick up both the Andromeda and Triangulum Galaxies in the Northern Hemisphere, and the Magellanic Clouds in the Southern Hemisphere. Moving up to DSLRs, with a wide-field lens and a high ISO capability, you’ll also be able to image them, especially when fitted to a portable tracking mount. By adding shorter focal-length lenses, the two companions of M31 can also be captured, along with the disc of the Andromeda Galaxy.

Even more detail can be imaged with an equatorial mount as a platform, either by taking long, guided exposures or by stacking lots of short exposures through a telescope. This will capture the dust lanes of the Andromeda Galaxy, NGC 185 and NGC 147, and some of the nebulous parts of the Triangulum Galaxy such as NGC 604. Increasing the aperture of your telescope and using a deep-sky CMOS or CCD camera will add even more detail and allow you to image the globular clusters of the Andromeda Galaxy too.

By using either an automated remote imaging setup or the Stellina imaging system (right), it’s now possible to capture not just the popular members of the Local Group, but also many of the fainter targets.

The Stellina Observation Station is a fully automated option for deep-sky imaging, which we reviewed in our February 2020 issue

▼ See if you can locate NGC 147 (or Caldwell 17), a dwarf spheroidal galaxy in the Local Group