NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day for September 27, 2026 presented a before-and-after comparison of the Andromeda galaxy, M31, described as the Milky Way's closest major galactic neighbor.

The before image is a stack of 223 exposures of 300 seconds each, taken in 2019 from a garden observatory in Portugal. According to the accompanying explanation, it shows the galaxy as a long exposure through Earth's skies and a digital camera captures it, including bright parallel airplane trails, long and continuous satellite trails, short cosmic ray streaks and bad pixels.

The after image used Astro Pixel Processor, DeepSkyStacker and PixInsight rather than Photoshop specifically. The entry says the processing greatly reduced these imperfections not to create a digital fantasy, but to minimize Earthly artifacts unrelated to the distant galaxy and better recreate what M31 really looks like. The image is credited to Kees Scherer.