Messier 31 Progression

[upahill]

M31 has been pretty much my goto (haha) whilst I get used to my gear and how everything works. I wanted to use it as a kind of comparison from day 1 and see how it improved as I go forward, so this is the last 6 months or so, still so much to learn ??

This was my first attempt which I was fairly chuffed with, before I removed the filter in the canon, and before I had guiding:

Then I felt a bit better when I got this - completely blew out the core and the canon banding was quite prevelant:

More subs and more practice with processing and I think it improved quite a bit, I also think this was the stage I added guiding into the mix.

At this stage I decided the only way around not getting an expensive camera was to just keep racking up the hours, so I did. Believe it or not there are 8 hours of exposures in my latest shot - which seems ridiculous compared to what everyone else is getting - but it seems to have worked. I now need to do it all again on nights without full moons! Heres my latest attempt.

Next step - improve my flats, the ones im generating at the moment are just not good enough and I think that, combined with poor processing is whats causing the areas of light haze in the top left / bottom right corners.

Interesting to see how the hobby develops though I thought.

[feilimb]

Lovely final image, and nice to see the progression over time. I have also been getting some strange glow introduced from flats in my M31 (not there when I don't use flats), I posted a result here (much shorter total data at just over an hour):

 

[upahill]

Thanks, I was convinced the almost full moon had something to do with it too, so it was interesting to see your shot was taken during a large moon too. If it is the flats I think mine are just underexposed at the moment and not fully illuminating which is producing a weird glow. I think its appearing in opposite corners due to half the images being flipped. Going to get really selective with subs and experiment a little to try and isolate it.