First Andromeda

[cuivenion]

Out for the pub quiz Thursday night and got a bit tiddly, got home and thought I'd get the scope out. Three hours later I'm polar aligned and have the mount pointing at M31 with about 30 minutes of Astro Night left and the moon has just set. Didn't think I'd get anything useable as I was using a 50mm Finder (about 230mm FL) to image M31 to get the correct image scale as the Altair GPCAM I'm using has a pixel size of 3.8um.

30 x 60 second Lights, 15 Darks. Taken on a AstroEQ EQ5 with an Altair GPCAM with a 50mm aperture 'Big Eye' Finder. Processing all done in DSS and I used super pixel mode to bring more detail out. If some one could let me know why the stars are so bloated, (focus, optics) that would be great. I'm always looking for feedback.

[wimvb]

Nice image for this simple setup.

I think that the star size is mainly due to the small sensor size and the scope quality (not intended for this application).

The dimmer stars are much tighter, which indicates that focus wasn't that bad. Were the larger stars overexposed in the raw/linear images?

 

[cuivenion]

1 hour ago, wimvb said:

Nice image for this simple setup.

I think that the star size is mainly due to the small sensor size and the scope quality (not intended for this application).

The dimmer stars are much tighter, which indicates that focus wasn't that bad. Were the larger stars overexposed in the raw/linear images?

 

Yes the larger ones also seem to have halo's, which I put down to the optics.

[laudropb]

Very nice first attempt.

[cuivenion]

Cheers laudrop!