My first go at Andromeda M31

[AstroJOE]

Hi guys, having finally thrown the towel in on DSO imaging with an SCT (CPC 1100), I took the plunge and got myself a Skywatcher Equinox ED80 Pro. This is my first proper go at M31 from Friday night, 9 x 10min exposures at ISO800 plus 9 x darks, 20 x bias, 20 x flats and 20 x dark flats.

Needless to say it's far from perfect, in fact it's far closer to totally imperfect !! However, it's a world away from the efforts I attempted with the CPC1100 so I cant wait to get out and have another go.

It's not all plain sailing, the ED80 is piggybacked on top of the CPC1100 on a heavy duty wedge so my guiding is still somewhat limited and my polar alignment needs a bit of work. All things considered, even though it's nowhere near as good as most of the other M31's that get posted on here, I'm fairly happy with it......as a starting point anyway!

Any advice on how to improve the colour balance etc would be very welcome !   

James

[ollypenrice]

You're on your way with this. The first thing I'd attack would be the gradients. Take a diagonal across this image from bottom left to top right and you'll see that the lower right triangle's background is a good bit brighter than that of the top left. The best gradient corrector is DBE in Pixinsight but if you have Photoshop there is a good plug in by Russ Croman called Gradient Xterminator.

Olly

[Moonshed]

That is a really good first image, I wished mine would come out that good, still working on it! Well done.