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
It's a good image, my suggestions are: recalibrate color (ciano is over), retrieves the core, take under control the smoothness, and be careful with minimum filter with the stars...it could be a great image in my opinion, more than 6 hours work deserves a new repro
Andromeda is a bad beast
Nice work, Rob. You're a sucker for punishment I'm sure you can squeeze a bit more out of the data but it's quite an achievement for such a difficult target at our latitude. Quite good detail and nice colour.
Well Rob, I recon you can feel very satisfied with that result and put another notch in your imaging bed post
I am going on a South Pacific Cruise for Christmas and look forward to a clear evening or two on board to have a look as some northern constellations, will be taking my binoculars too
It does look a bit off colour and lumpy especially in the compressed jpg with a new set of eyes tonight. Thanks Elio and Greg for the processing thoughts. I find galaxies a challenge, particularly when you get down below 30 degrees altitude like this. As Rick and Dave have told me - I need to get up a bit higher out of the dust to make life easier of course
I really wanted to bring out the blue star fields and a hint of the red Ha nebula regions. Think I need a calibrated monitor before too long too. Always some gadget to lust for in this hobby!
Great going Rob, not an easy target for the altitude hey, always some amount of murky sky there, But yep, I dig the light you have portrayed here , speshly around the core mate, Job well Done
Great pic. Never had a serious go at this one. Too low for me.
