Slowly improving my imaging skills [M31]!

[AstroPhil]

Happy to say my imaging skills are slowly improving (i'm more of a visual observer!). The below is 90 minutes integration using 5min subs, camera is an un-cooled starlight ultrastar (mono) through a Zenithstar71. Darks, flats all applied and processed in PixInsight. Any comments for improvement very welcome indeed!

Clear skies all!

 

[choochoo_baloo]

For a first go of Andromeda that is impressive Phil. I'm a bit behind you in the astrophotography journey - about to incorporate autoguiding. I assume you used autoguiding? I've found that ~3 mins is the greatest exposure time before elliptical stars appear when photographing Andromeda.

Can you also explain in simple terms what role Pixinsight fulfils? Does it replace Photoshop for processing, and also provide frame stacking?

Well done again!

[Sunshine]

That's an awesome first shot!

[AstroPhil]

@choochoo_baloo yes it's guided. Took a while to get that working nicely, I admit. PixInsight is the software for calibrating and subtracting dark frames, flat frames, to get a nice clean image for stacking. It's not freeware though (DSS is a free alternative I used previously). But is does incorporate a host of tools to improve the image - like Photoshop - to the final image. This is my next learning curve I suspect. Thanks to an excellent tutorial blog at lightvortex astronomy I have the basics now, but this image is only with a very simple stretch using its HistogramTransformation tool: but I know there are myriad other tools that can then be used to tweak the image! (I never really got on with layers in Photoshop for instance).