SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

Had trouble with my first picked subject.
So hopped over to Andromeda and let'er run.

PHD2 did not want to behave. So I was relying on what I was seeing. More of an experiment than anything else.

Bias, Darks, and Lights stacked with ASI Studio. Narrowband only.
Touched up in PS12. Saved for the web. And plunked down here.

(Download)

Marc G Loc: East Grinstead, West Sussex, England

Hiya mate.

I too was on Andromeda Friday night, yet to process data

SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

I'm confident yours will be much, much better, Marc.
Of course, tonight everything is working perfectly again.
I'm shooting my nemesis. The Dumbbell Nebula.

SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

Here's the image as it came out of the ASI program.
Unadulterated, uncropped, unfettered.
I think better.

OK, I showed you mine. Now you show me yours, mate.

(Download)

profbowman Loc: Harrisonburg, VA, USA

Thanks so much for sharing your observation of the Andromeda galaxy. I am not sure if my monitor is not calibrated correctly nor if my eyes are!! For whatever reason, I did not see any details of the arms in your photo of Andromeda on my monitor. I was guessing that you had recorded some of the arm structure, but they would be much dimmer that the central bulge.

After working with the contrast and brightness for some time, I got an idea that working with the negative of the photo might enable me to see what I needed to do more easitly. I had tried returning it to the positive print, but I liked viewing the negative. S9o, here it is as good as I could get it. To reduce the noise, I did shrin the photo size.

Anyway, you did record some arm structure. Excellent! --Richard

SonnyE Loc: Communist California, USA

Glad you enjoyed, Richard.
I think I probably over exposed for this. So the dust trails vanish in the glare.
I'm not sure what was going on with my guiding, but last night everything was working perfectly again.
There is so much going on between the equipment and the computer, sometimes I need to stop and start over.
And sometimes I need to completely shut down, then start from scratch to get things working right.
But more often than not, my soufflé doesn't fall down.
I invite you do download any of my images and process them for yourself. Unfortunately, I can't put up the better tif files because UHH doesn't allow the larger files.

profbowman Loc: Harrisonburg, VA, USA

With my bad eyesight, I do not seem capable of doing good astrophotography. However, I can download and mess around with the files others seem to get easily. BTW, I did follow through this time on my suggestion, to the main photography forum. That is as I saved and worked with a jpg file, I saved it in a .jp2=jpg2000 file format. This is a lossless jpg format. I only changed it to a jpg format file at the very end. --Richard

Ballard Loc: Grass Valley, California

Hi SonnyE
This version shows the dust lanes a bit better. M31 is large that it doesn't fit into this field of view, A focal reducer might be able to get the whole thing in, or take a couple of offset shots and stitch them together. I found that I can just get it in with a 500mm lens and a full frame sensor.