Greetings all, time for my two yearly check-in as that seems to be how long it takes for me to get a single clear night to coincide with not being in the most light polluted city in the world.
Brief holiday trip a farm house in the south of the Netherlands took my scope. Wanted to shoot the comet but evidently I can't read a compass so it was behind a tree when the sun set. Switch to the North American nebula until it set and was about to go to bed at 2:30am when I saw the weather forecast - rain the rest of the week.
One night of imaging only. So I grabbed a coffee and shot M31 which was directly overhead.
11 subs at 5min each
Camera: QHY8
Scope: Meade ED80
Mount: HEQ6
Just for fun I thought I'd add a comparison. My last time doing M31 was Astrofest 2013. Back then I threw 3 hours of data at it. Quite a difference not only having better equipment, but also shooting an object above you rather than one that only just clears the horizon :-)
I'm not sure the 3 hours were the big contributor to the more data as much as it was Astrofest compared to the insanely lightpolluted Netherlands. I couldn't even see the milky way where I was.
Nice work! Wish I could get a line-of-sight view of m31 from here but it’s so low on the horizon. You can certainly see the benefit of shooting from darks sky in that comparison. Thanks for sharing!
