Finally - M31 in view (mostly)

[Radec]

This has been years in the making for all the wrong reasons - wrong telescope/wrong camera/wrong weather - I've had the lot, so I've never managed to get a single image of the Andromeda Galaxy, until now!

This is only 66 minutes and is also only lights - no darks, no flats & no dark flats - taken with my AA ED102 Triplet, A .79 reducer, AA 269c CMOS camera and processed in Pixinsight. Minimal clumsy interference from me, so I'm quite happy with it.

 

Edited February 7, 2021 by Radec

[Stargazer33]

That's really nice. The stars are a good shape, right into the corners and you've kept them tamed well. There's some nice detail in the dust lanes too.

[Radec]

Thanks Bryan. Could do with more exposure but the cloud gods thought otherwise. Just grateful for what they allowed me. 
Keith

[peter shah]

That's a lovely rendition, I'd say it was well worth the wait!

[Radec]

Thanks Peter - I finally resolved the issues I was having with black artefacts caused by cold pixels from the dark frames and so was able to do a full calibrated process. Here is the result, which I think is an improvement on the light frames only version; certainly better colour depth.

So this one is 11 x 360s lights, darks, flats and dark flats processed in PI using WBPP. Interestingly the recommendation from Adam Block was to put the dark flats in the Bias tab and let PI sort from there (rather than in the darks or flats tab) and this worked extreemly well.

Modest tweaking in post processing as the data is quite good from this excellent Altair 269c camera. Just need some clear skies instead of 23mm of snow!