When I had my first peek at Andromeda I was using my 8 inch dob and could only see the big fuzzy ball of light from this massive galaxy. Still an amazing sight and hard to believe I could watch another galaxy from my garden. This thing is huge – visually it’s almost 6 times a full moon and has more than a trillion stars in it.

In the last few months I started thinking how to approach bigger and wider targets such as this one. I contemplated buying a fancy refractor but in the end the solution was much simpler. I purchased the skywatcher evoguide 50ed as I needed a decent guide scope anyway, mounted my 533 MCP on it with a field flattener and put the whole assembly in the finder bracket of my 130 pds. This is not ideal because it means guiding at a focal length that is much larger than the imaging scope but it seems to work just fine for now. I need to fix some of the issues (tilt in the corners) but otherwise I’m happy with the image.