M31, Andromeda Galaxy

[WaveSoarer]

After a first attempt at M31 a couple of weeks ago, Mrs WaveSoarer and I had another go this evening with her SLR at prime focus. I managed to focus the camera really poorly at our first go this evening and the stars were all polo mint shaped. We then followed advice from our attempt on the ring nebula and we took a long exposure and then checked the focusing on the screen on the back of the camera body. All seemed well and I even remembered to lock the focus to avoid it slipping. We reduced the ISO this time from 1600 to 800 to help reduce the noise and Mrs WaveSoarer stacked 25 of the 30s exposures in photoshop. The scope was tracking with a reasonably good polar alignment.

We're quite happy with the result and I rotated the camera to align the galaxy with the diagonal of the frame. We just missed M32, though, which you can just see as the glow at the bottom right of the frame. There are no dark images used and we'll have a go at that some day soon. You can see a purple artifact at top left which comes from the sensor, this appears on all the images we've taken so far, and we'll need to use darks to correct this out. We could have used far fewer subs to produce a similar result but we used all the data we had.

[whooshbang]

Thats impressive, plenty of detail there. Well done Mr & Mrs WaveSoarer

[Aenima]

Man, that is an awesome effort, guys. Well done!

Thats really well captured and processed, and the idea to take ISO down a notch looks like it paid off.

These were all still 30sec exposures? Have you managed or tried to get longer? Longer times usually makes all the difference with most objects, except maybe star clusters, but if you can do it, then its worth the try.

With your/our set-up weight is a big issue with tracking - though your RA motor looks to be working great - and to get longer exposures a guidescope is required. Now, luckily, a few people have come up against this problem and came up with the finderguider which i'm looking into - nothing new, except to me obviously, but to those with 200p/EQ5 its a great lightweight and relatively inexpensive solution.

I'm happy to have got any imaging to work for now, as you probably are, but want to definitely set sights on guided long exposure. Quartermass is the king of our set-up and has given great instructions on his blog

http://astrocasto.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/how-to-set-up-guiding-system-for-your.html

for fellow EQ5/200P users, also check out his images - the earlier ones are with this same set-up.

Well i'm far from knowing how its done, but having some good results on the way.

Again, congrats on the great image - excellent stuff.

Regards

Aenima

[breezy]

i have no idea what you are on about with all the techno babble, but i know a good photo when i see it

[Eddy_J1]

Nice detail for saying how short exposures are, better than my 2nd attempt at m31. If you do struggle to focus(although it looks pretty damm good) you could invest in a bahtinov to help with focus.

[andyboy1970]

Good effort, lots of details in the dust lanes.

[WaveSoarer]

Just a quick correction. We did actually get M32, the bright blob to the left of M31's core, and it's M110 that's just off frame. Thanks to Andy Casely for correcting me.

[Gina]

Coming along nicely Longer subs to get more of the dimmer stuff and maybe guiding would make a big difference but this is a good start When you get more of the dim data and see the enormous size of this galaxy, you might want to do a mosaic.

[sulaco]

That's a very impressive i have the same set up and love it, half the fun is finding the boundries of it

[VigdisVZ]

Great result! You can pick up a lot of details in M31 with short exposures.

You're a bit overexposed i the core, but it's pretty hard to pick out the dust lanes and have normal exposure in the core, so dont blame yourself.

Darks and flats will help this also.

You're off to a cracking start! Looking forward to see where you take it from here.

Here is my first stacked DSO image as reference, it contains about 15 minutes of data with 20sec subs, incl. darks:

[sologuitarist61]

Beautiful - well done

[stellawolf]

Nice image well done

[andyo]

Nice shot,well done

[WaveSoarer]

Thanks to all for your kind comments. We're still definitely still learning as we go and all advice is greatly appreciated. We quite like the simplicity of our setup as I can get it out, polar aligned, and pretty much ready to go within about ten minutes (subject to cooling). Much of this time is lugging stuff up and down stairs. I agree with sulaco as it's actually quite a lot of fun squeezing the most out of the setup. I have been looking at the guiding mods, as Aenima has pointed out, but I think that I'd prefer to keep to what I have for now as the simplicity (and ease of setting up) is very attractive. I still want to do mainly visual and imaging is an added bonus for sharing with Mrs WaveSoarer, and our various friends, and to bring out more more the really faint objects.

For this image we have loads of subs and we had to tone down the final stacked image. It would be interesting to hear how the core can be calmed down, to reveal more detail, as we can then think about doing a mosaic, as Gina has pointed out, for subsequent attempts.

Lots of fun to be had and a great deal to learn.

[VigdisVZ]

Im not sure the way you stacked it in Photoshop. Maybe it could be worth having a whack at Deep Sky Stacker. If you could post an original sub, it would be easy to judge if its the stacking in PS or the subs that are generating the over exposure.

[Austin]

nice one, well done

[WaveSoarer]

Here is one of the subs. You can see how compact and bright the core actually is.

[StuartJPP]

Very good image of M31.

If you managed to get that much out of your subs, I am doing something wrong.

[aGreyarea]

Great image, it's such a great feeling being able to admire your own work isn't it?!

I think that the artefact you mentioned might be light leakage. I had a similar, but much stronger effect, on my first image. It was where I had not covered the DSLRs viewfinder.

Have fun!

[WaveSoarer]

Thanks for the tip regarding the view finder, AGrayarea. We'll try to cover this the next time we get the chance to do some imaging. I think that we might have been a little lucky with this one, StuartJPP, especially with the focusing. I'm still amazed at what's possible from our back garden.

[VigdisVZ]

I think you did very good from what you have yes. Keep up the good work. When you feel advanced you could try taking two sets of exposures, one for the core and one for the outer regions, then masking them together in PS.

[WaveSoarer]

Carl,

Tips on masking would be useful. Mrs WaveSoarer is a dab-hand with PS but any help would be welcome as we don't want to have anything that looks artificial.

Dave

[Aenima]

Carl,

Tips on masking would be useful. Mrs WaveSoarer is a dab-hand with PS but any help would be welcome as we don't want to have anything that looks artificial.

Dave

Check out youtube, there are a few decent tutorials on PS and deepskystacker regarding basic astro processing. Quartermass has made some good ones - under the name boodlewoodle - which you can find by following the link in my earlier post to the astrocasto blog (He's pulled the most from our set-up that I know of and his results are quite inspiring) .

I also got inspired to try M31 again, and got lucky as well with the focus too, as I broke my bahtinov mask a week or so back so its back to trial and error. so far, after stacking, there isn't as much detail visible as the one you posted above, will have another bash at it before posting it.

I think my canon 300D has a smaller sensor coz it fits less in the frame than the one ms wavesoarer uses, its old but seeing as it was a generous donation from my uncle who passed it on as faulty, I really cant complain. It does exactly what I hoped it would when attached to my scope. (the fault is in the auto-focus malfunctioning but dont need it for astro )

look forward to seeing the next one

All the best,

Regards

Aenima

I was getting 50-70 sec exposures quite happily last night, a bit of luck and a very good sign for the future considering my rough polar alignment and lack of guiding -

[StuartJPP]

The glow could be "amp glow" from the sensor, but as suggested, try covering the viewfinder first.

[Aenima]

Never heard of covering the viewfinder, though it probably is just common sense with some cameras.

Also the layer masking idea is another good one, I would be into learning how that works too.

Tonight would be a great night but the wind is rough here, would ruin half the shots. Still gonna give it a go - so few clear nights that any opportunity is worth taking.

Clear skies and still air to all.

Regards

Aenima

PS yes! fixed my bahtinov mask, so glad it wasnt dead - fiddling with focus can be frustrating.