M31 a year on

[earth titan]

Edited: Should be M31 in the title. Fat fingers on the keypad.....

Could a mod correct - Pretty please?

It often seems disheartening when I open open up an image and play with it.

All that hard work!

It's not until you look back and see what you've achieved and how far you've come that you get a sense of satisfaction.

So I thought it I would post two pictures to show the improvement made in twelve months on the same target at the same time of year, so others can see what perseverance can do.

Both were taken at ISO 1600, 300 seconds. Both are 9 stacked pictures

The 1st was with an 80mm Revelation Achromatic refractor on an HEQ5

The 2nd is with my 80mm Revelation ED fpl53 refractor on an NEQ6

Stacking technique and taking of flats and darks has improved things.

Both noisy. Next stage (when the clouds finally clear again) is to add lots more data.

[Gina]

I like the second one particularly A touch on the colour balance would inprove it - remove the magenta cast.

[earth titan]

Cheers Gina. I'll give that a tweak.

Typed by me, using fumms...

[SJJ]

Really nice improvement Tom.

[Spikey]

There ya go, title changed. That's a good M31, not an easy target to process.

[Stargazer Jack]

A great improvement. As you have said, it is a bit noisy but it can all get better.

[Earl]

Excellent, if i may its time to do some ToT, Time on Target, give it 4 hours worth of subs if you can.

[earth titan]

Excellent, if i may its time to do some ToT, Time on Target, give it 4 hours worth of subs if you can.

Hee hee...

I agree about ToT! This was all I could grab on Saturday night before the clouds came in.

Anyhows, at the suggestion from Gina, I tweeked the colour balance and this allowed me to pull a bit more detail out.

Hope you like it!

[Daniel-K]

getting there tom, its nice just to roll the roof off and be taking subs in 5 min

[Gina]

Yes, that's better Though it looks a tiny bit green here

[laser_jock99]

I have just found my first M31 shot from the early 90's !!

One from a year ago.

Now compare to my last image.

[earth titan]

Nice ones. Perhaps this is a good idea for a thread:

'Show us your imaging progress'

Typed by me, using fumms...

[Darth Takahashi]

You're certainly making some nice progress.

[Gina]

Yes indeed It's certainly interesting to see the progress in image quality as you get more experienced. And sometimes due to better/more equipment like guiding.

[earth titan]

Without doubt I think a lot of progress is down to improved equipment.

My initial images were taken with an achromat and the latest with a semi-APO. Guiding makes a huge difference.

I think the another big leap is processing however and taking calibration frames (darks, flats etc). I now take alsmost as many darks as lights and am building up a nice library of darks for different temperature ranges.

[Mark72]

Yes, a lot of progress! Good work on this

Mark

[michaelmorris]

Nice image, loads of detail in the spiral arms and dust lanes.

[earth titan]

And after another night of intermittent data (clouds again) I'm getting an image I'm proud of.

I made a bit of the bodge of masking in places, so there are some dark streaks on the background which I will fix when I get more data, but I think this shows the benefit of time and data.

Hope you like.

[earth titan]

I posted this in another thread. As I don't sleep much I spend time trawling though the hits thrown up by google, and I came accross this link which is the workflow I followed for the image above:

http://www.askc.org/Astro_Photo%20Workshop.html

Some nice little techniques in there.

Hope it helps others.

[earth titan]

And another go. This time with x2 drizzle and a lot of patience in the stretching etc.

This is the one I think looks most natural and I'm going to leave it there until I get more data.

This was taken with my 80mm Revelation FPL53, guided by 50mm finder / guider and QHY5

20 subs (ISO1600 x 300 secs). Total time = 100 mins

20 darks (as above)

10 flats

Stacked and initial stretch in DSS

Finished off in PS - CS6

[allcart]

I new it was gonna be a good one Tom. Lets see what tonight brings.

[Gina]

Very nice image