My Nemesis Finally Overcome - M31

[Astrosurf]

Lady Andromeda has always eluded me. Often because of clouds, bad luck etc. Last night, I finally (after a grueling start when EVERYTHING went wrong!) got her to kowtow.

Thanks sooooo much Melsky and Steve of CNAAG for your amazing help and patience with my increasing frustration. It was verging on the superhuman! You're my saviours.

The image is composed of 20 subs of 5 mins at ISO 1600 + 15 darks. Taken with my modded 600D.

It's taken me a long time to process with iterations of Levels, often isolating the core and the bright M32 satellite galaxy. Then I used iterations of Curves and also Hue/Saturation to remove the purple colour then a final Curves on the red channel to reduce the red very slightly. I know there's so much more that can be done with PS but I don't know how yet! I must find time to look at the wealth of tutorials on the Web.

If you have any tips please tell me!

Alexxx

[WaveSoarer]

That's a very nice image indeed. Well worth the wait.

[melsky]

Well done Alex, glad I was there to help put the toys back in the pram

Mel

[Astrosurf]

Thanks guys!

Mel, any tips??

[melsky]

Well  looks like we had very similar framing for our shots, we'll have to swap files and see what we can get out of the others data.

Mel

[Astrosurf]

You've managed to get more of the faint stuff. You were doing 8 mins though which must make a difference! How many subs did you get? I'll try to stretch mine a bit more tonight.

Let's have an Andromeda processing evening! I'm sure others have taken pics of it.

[Astrosurf]

What did you do to remove the red without losing colour in the dust lanes? I can't seem to get rid of the purple without making it look almost mono!

[melsky]

21 frames of 8 mins each in the end, yes let's have an Andromeda processing evening, if you can let me have all your raw files on a disc first (lights and darks) I can do the boring bit first.

Mel

[ollypenrice]

Alex, your colour balance would be the first thing to sort out and by far the easiest way is to do 2 minutes' work in Pixinsight's DBE. You can Dropbox me an unstretched TIFF and I'll run it through and send it you back still unstretched, but colour calibrated, and you'll see the difference -if you like.

Olly

[Astrosurf]

Thanks guys! Yes Mel, I'll send you the files. I'll need your address! I'll email our imagers and see if they want to meet up.

Thanks so much for offering, Olly, but I must learn more PS! I'd like to get Pixinsight but I can't afford it.