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Old 25-10-2013, 01:48 AM
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RobF (Rob)
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Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Brisbane, Australia
Posts: 5,735
M31 - 2013 Leyburn Campaign + Repro effort

OK, so I may be a just a little obsessed with Andromeda. Over the years I've tried to get decent M31 data at Astrofest, usually involving lots of mosaicing, then cloud/fog/sleep deprivation cuts in in the early hours of the morning leading to big compromises.

This year I took a few days off for Oct new moon to capture M31 from Leyburn's dark skies. To be honest the distant lights of Toowoomba were still a bot of a hindrance for an object this low to the north until it was getting up towards transit time. Even though I collected quite a bit of data, the gradients in the RGB were challenging. Later I found I had blurring of stars in my longer Lum frames, possibly due to the imaging train unscrewing a little when the cables pulled during a meridian flip, or perhaps focuser movement. Grrr, you live and learn for things to watch for.

I haven't had a big dataset to play with for a while, so processing included all sorts of tricks to contain stars (extracting RGB artificial lum, then registering the slightly smeared master Lum frames on that), gradient removal in PI, and lots of torture to pull out the colour. Have possibly lost a little galaxy extension the process, but happy for now.

Anyway, this is about 6.25 hours of main 5 and 10 mins subs, with some 2min subs to help the star profiles
LRGB 120:94:90:74
QHY9 on FSQ106ED @ f3.7

Larger zoomable version here
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Last edited by RobF; 04-11-2013 at 11:24 PM.
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