Astrophotography: Andromeda

I’ve taken a stab at photographing the Andromeda galaxy, with promising results for a fixed camera that doesn’t track the stars. Minimum zoom, about 6 second exposure:

You can see Andromeda about 2/3 up on the right.

Here’s about half my zoom capability, several second exposure:

And here’s full zoom, about 20 seconds worth of exposure:

Clearly, that last photo well and truly sucks. That is due wholly to the camera being fixed to a tripod, while the stars turn overhead. With a motorized equatorial mount, the streaking should go away, leaving the image pretty well fixed.

I’ve just bought a dirt-cheap equatorial mount off of eBay that I will set up for this purpose. The motor itself looks like it’ll cost about twice as much, but I guess there’s not much point to the mount without the motor.