My Andromeda Strain

I strained hard to find the galaxy Andromeda (M31) in my camera's viewfinder, and I strained to get a good sharp focus. Using a 70-300mm lens zoomed all the in, the galaxy appears in the upper left portion of the top image. A successful focus was achieved by focusing to infinity in manual, then tweaking it back just a bit. The image, captured from Brentwood Drive NE in Cedar Rapids, Iowa at 9:05 pm CDT, Friday, November 4, 2016, is a 6 second exposure at f/5.6, 5000 ISO and 300mm focal length. Andromeda was shining at apparent magnitude 4.5 and was 70 degrees above the horizon.

The image above was exposed with the same settings as the image at top, but cropped closer in post-processing. The Andromeda Galaxy is the most distant object that can be seen with the naked eye. It resides some 2.5 million light years from Earth, but is predicted to be on a collision course with the Milky Way in about 4 billion years. Nikon D7200 DSLR camera.