Virtually every respectable astrophotographer has taken their crack at Andromeda, also known as M31 or Messier 31. This is my storied journey to capture Andromeda (and its two bonus neighbors) in Bortle 9 skies, which was not successful, but not a total loss either. My first attempt with M31 was with a still single frame from El Capitan campground near Santa Barbara, where it was clearly visible in the image, although the image was quite poor (but it still excited me). My second was using a DSLR, stock lens, and equatorial mount from Prescott, AZ in Bortle 4 skies - that came out a little better (maybe I'll add those two to the blog), but still a lot to be desired. This year I'd set out to create the most amazing image of Andromeda that I've ever seen from a Bortle 9 location - high resolution, perfectly calibrated, and printable and framed up to 30"x40" +. In late September, a rare spate of sequential atmospherically calm coastal nights offered the opportunity. So I set out on a 4 night journey, putting in ~23 hours of time, with my Williams Optics 71 mm apochromatic refractor, with the equatorial mount autoguided on a guide star, to gather in around 18 hours of raw exposure time, most of it broadband with a lightpollution filter, but ~5 hours of that using narrowband H-alpha oriented filter to bring out some of red nebulosity regions. I finally had my masterpiece of imaging data I'd been waiting for. Until I took my calibration frames :( An enigmatic noise source was present in the flat-field calibration frames (which is the calibration frame that pulls out most of the gradient left by light pollution and cancels out any FOD (Foriegn Object Debris) image artifacts - aka dust-bunnies - in the imagery. I was quite disheartened to say the least. This was the same issue that plagued my early summer imaging of the M51 Whirlpool Galaxy (subject of a prior blog post). Skipping over another 10-15 hours of forum posting and root cause analysis, it turned out that moisture had permeated through the oring on the dessicated astrocamera, and saturated the dessicant tabs, resulting in dew on the sensor window when cooled by the peltier cooler (aka Thermo-Electric Cooler, or TEC) to my imaging temperature of -10C. I set the imagery aside for a while out of frustration, but after creating a STEM presentation for a local elementary school with what I could salvage of the image, I figured it was worth revisiting....so, I spend some more time with the image files and was able to generate the above image, without any calibration frames, and figured it was worth sharing......even with its heavy post-processing to remove FOD artifacts, and other artifacts that make it a "not for professional print" image if you look too close. That being said, it's still awesome to observe the spiral dust lanes, cyan areas of star formation, and barely visible H-alpha red hues visible in our nearest galactic neighbor, just 2.5 million light years away, wich will collide with ours sometime in the seemingly infinite future. It takes 200,000 years for the light to get from one side of M31 to the other, meaning those clear dust lanes in the spiral are at least 100,000 light years across. The approximately 1 trillion stars of Andromeda create an eyeball-visible fuzz ball in the sky in Bortle 1-2 conditions. The size of Andomeda in the sky was very surprising to me when I started this hobby - while I looked through my high magnification 8" SCT back near the beginning of time, I couldn't understand why I couldn't see even a faint spiral object.....little did I know in my naiveté that the galaxy has the apparent anglular size in our sky of well over 3 moons wide (where my Field of View of my telescope was about 1/2 a moon in diameter). And for a bonus, this is actually 3 galaxies in one image - M110 and M32 are the fuzzballs below-left, and just above Andromeda. So, in the end, I was able to salvage this image, which can still amaze me what we can pull out of the Bortle 9 sky onto an imaging chip and produce such a glimpse into our universe. And with all of my mistakes and trials in astrophotogrpahy, they will make me even more ready next summer when I plan to get my M31 masterpiece finally.