M31 2-frame mosaic

Weather: Clear skies and good seeing. Moon rising late so not intrusive but bad LP. The guide scope stayed on target the entire night.

Optics and camera: Skywatcher Evostar 120 F/D=8.33 (Achromat) with a Baader UHCs filter. The camera was a IR-filter removed Canon 600D.

Settings: 30 x 3 + 33 x 3 minute lights, 50 darks from library, 50 flats taken recently and 50 bias frames. ISO 800. All images were taken with 15 second intervals to remove residual charge from the sensor.

Mount: Skywatcher AZ-EQ6 with extension pillar.

Processing: The Lights and calibrations frames were processed using Pixinsight. The final images were balanced to retain average white stars. I also used Gimp to add a selective Gaussian blur over a 5 pixel range to blend residual RGB noise and slightly increase saturation.

Comments: My first whole image of M31 using two stacked images. The frames overlapped so the core of M31 received the full 63 frames worth of data. This is a good first attempt but I still need to work on getting faint detail from the edges.