M31 — Dust Lanes and Companions

A tighter framing of the same galaxy, bringing out the structure that a wide field flattens: the bright central bulge, the dust lanes wrapping around it, and the mottled texture of the spiral arms where star-forming regions and dust clouds alternate. Andromeda and the Milky Way are approaching each other at about 110 km/s and will begin to merge in a few billion years.