My 1st M31 attempt - any tips and comments will be gladly recieved

[Adrian23]

Sorry - I know there has been a whole host of M31's over the last few weeks but I thought I'd add mine to mix.

I know its not very good but it represents my 1st attempt at this object (and is only the 3rd DSO image I have shared with everyone here on SGL) which is why any comments and tips on how to improve will be gladly received.

The technical details are:

- SW Evostar 80ED DS Pro on a Celestron AVX mount

- Canon 500D DSLR unmodded, captured by APT

- 20 x 90sec subs @ ISO800 unguided

- 10 darks

- 30 flats

- 30 bias shots

- stacked in DSS and processed in GIMP

Thanks everyone for taking the time to help me in my journey into these dark arts.

Adrian

[Charic]

If thats your 1st attempt, congratulations.

For starters, I'd like  to  try a few Star trails  with with my  Nikon . Learn  some  new photo editing  features  (freeware of course!) and learn more  about Stacking.  There is so much to learn about astrophotography, but keeping it simple,  either just the DSLR or maybe in conjunction with the Dob?

I've also  seen some incredible images of aircraft taken at  extreme altitude taken with a DSLR mounted on a Dobsonian. There lays an interest for me. ( http://images.extremespotting.com/ )

[Th3Edge]

Nice image made there after seeing all the M31 images including my own image, all images look slightly different but all great to look at.

[lensman57]

Very good first attempt. M31 seems an target as it is large and bright but you really do need a lot of data to make it sing. Try for 30subs of 180s to start with and see what happenes.

A.G

[wxsatuser]

Good start.

[Adrian23]

Thanks everyone for your support so far. Lensman - thanks for the advise - more subs it is although I might find 180 sec unguided a little beyond my reach. Possibly can stretch to 120 sec with good PA though. But I'll give 180 a go - gonna try to push the unguided to the max before I add more "spells" to my dark arts arsenal :-)

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[PeterCPC]

Nicely done.

Peter

[stevetynant]

I'm not into ap myself but that looks a fantastic image to me, well done.

[glowingturnip]

looks very good, plenty of detail, and you've managed to not burn out the cores which seems to be a common crime.  More subs would help with cutting down the noise a bit, and have a go at pushing the saturation up a bit in post-processing to see if you can get some colour out of it.  Well done.

[Adrian23]

Thanks glowingturnip - more subs and increased saturation it is :-)

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[tingting44]

very nice 1st go! only to get better with the more data you add to it every session

[Knight of Clear Skies]

Nice work, especially for a first attempt. Framing a bit more from corner to corner would help to fit it in. You've picked up some of the faint outer regions, but they are cropped out on the left.

[Andrew W]

I don't seem to tire of seeing M31 and that's a nice picture of it.

[Geordie mc]

Great first attempt. More darks would also be good. There's some sort of square law going on in regards to noise reduction with darks. I'd go for at least 20. Keep up the good work.

[Adrian23]

Thanks for the tip Geordie MC - so it's more subs, more darks and more saturation. Thanks for all the help everyone. Things are starting to become a little clearer now

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[robbie c]

That's a great effort you must be well pleased with that, well done and keep up the good work 

[Adrian23]

I've finally got round to reprocessing the data with more saturation as suggested. Here is the result - I think I've gone too far though. I would welcome any thoughts and feedback ...

[lensman57]

I like your first attempt better, sorry. The data you have is really to hold the core from blowing, if you look at M110 and M32 you can see that the core is tight but the outer regions have little data or detail. What happens is that in order to bring the faint regions out you have to apply a more severe stretch but this causes the noise to take over the image  and then you have to clip the background and the darker pixels to avoid the noise from dominating. You have the basics right but just need to add more data to get the S/N ratio higher. With regret increasing the saturation will not compensate for lack of data, it just induces chroma noise.

Regards,

A.G

[Adrian23]

I agree - I think my 1st attempt is better. Just thought I'd try to get a bit more colour into it but clearly I lack enough data. But this is a learning curve that "tends to infinity ". I'm learning all the time from everyone's helpful comments and aim to improve with each new data set I acquire. Thanks Lensman for your critique - it's taken onboard :-)

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[lensman57]

I agree - I think my 1st attempt is better. Just thought I'd try to get a bit more colour into it but clearly I lack enough data. But this is a learning curve that "tends to infinity ". I'm learning all the time from everyone's helpful comments and aim to improve with each new data set I acquire. Thanks Lensman for your critique - it's taken onboard :-)

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You are welcome sir.

A.G