M31 awash with moonlight 7/10/12

[Tzetze]

Taken over two nights, this is a total of 4h10m data. There was a lot of light in the sky thanks to a waning gibbous moon and it really washed out a lot of the detail. Nevertheless I'm reasonably happy with the fact that I got so many usable subs at 600s, until the meridian flip, that is, when the guiding graph got very spikey before smoothing out again after a couple of hours.

There may be some good nights later in the week and I'd like to retarget M31 without a moon up and maybe step down to 360s exposures to prevent blowing out the core quite so much.

4h 10m data;

25x 600s subs

18 darks

25 flats

Canon 450D, CG5-GT, SW ED80

Stacked in DSS, Tweaked in PS & Lightroom

M31 071012 by .Tzetze., on Flickr

[firstscope]

great shot I saw it tonight for the 1st time

[Xplode]

Great picture with great detail

[Gina]

Very nice sharp image with lots of detail - great presentation of the dust lanes

[Tzetze]

Thanks guys. I was very happy with the amount of detail visible in the lanes towards the core but there seems to be a lot of data missing from the outer arms. I thought I would have picked that up from reasonable dark skies at 600s subs but I guess that's down to the level of moonlight present, huh? Like I say, I'll revisit M31 on a moonless night if I can. Still not sure what the best exposure length should be

[RobH]

Pretty deep considering the moon...good result.

Cheers

Rob

[Daniel-K]

good detail, a few overlapping frames in there, i would have just re calibrated phd after the flip only take 5 min and your guiding would have been spot on again

[Tzetze]

good detail, a few overlapping frames in there, i would have just re calibrated phd after the flip only take 5 min and your guiding would have been spot on again

I recalibrated it alright and tried tweaking the different parameters. There was a periodic spike every 6 or 7 minutes though and would take another 30s to pull the dec line back down to the origin. Leads me to think there might be some sticking in the mount. A tune-up is on the cards for it.

[laser_jock99]

good detail, a few overlapping frames in there, i would have just re calibrated phd after the flip only take 5 min and your guiding would have been spot on again

When using PHD for guiding I usaully have to spend a few minutes re-calibrating PHD if changing from East to West (or vice versa). Not sure why but the guiding won't work unless I do this?

[Daniel-K]

you can flip the calibration i thnk?