My first attempt at Andromeda

[RoloFanatic]

Over Christmas I finally decided it was time to try imaging Andromeda (not sure why I left it so long), I had a week and a half off, so plenty of time to wait for the perfect night....... It was cloudy all night, every night apart from a few hours on one evening when I rushed out for a very quick imaging session on Andromeda.

I was aiming to get 2 hours of exposure doing 60 x 2 min exposures however when I went to stack the images I realized that almost half of them were unusable. They had this weird double star effect which I haven't seen before. I thought this was maybe caused by wind making the mount wobble as I use a lightweight camera tripod which makes my setup quite top heavy. But if anyone has another diagnosis please let me know! Example image: 2021-12-26_19-46-02___120.00s_0029.cr2

Anyways, in future I think I will be using shorter 60 second or 30 second exposures to try and increase the proportion of usable frames.

Overall I was really happy with the resulting image, this was the first time I have gone in depth on the processing side of things. I feel I have to give a big thanks to Nebula Photos on youtube who had a great tutorial on processing Andromeda in GIMP. The final image was made up using 32 x 2 min lights, 20 x 2 min darks, 30 bias frames, darks and lights were taken using Nina, stacked in DeepSkyStacker and edited in GIMP and StarNet++. Image taken using WO Z73, iOptron SkyGuider Pro, Canon 600D (unmodified).

 

I have also included the original stacked image if anyone wants to have a go at processing it as well, I would be interested to see anyone can pull out more from this data! Any tips/feedback would be appreciated  

 

Clear skies!

Andromeda removed bad frames manual save 17.01.22.TIF

[teoria_del_big_bang]

Nice image.

I am not sure about the bad frames with double stars being wind.
Although your setup is pretty lightweight (I started with the WO73 and Canon 600D, I love the scope and still have it as I can't bear to part with it) a good sturdy mount and tripod does make life easier. But after saying that I would have thought wind would not necessarily give two distinct images of each bright star but be more blurry and give elongated stars. Also scope is pretty small and unless a gale wind is not particularly going to be a big issue (I would have thought - could be wrong).
It looks more like a jump in the tracking, or something moved suddenly.

Steve 

[AstroNebulee]

On 18/01/2022 at 10:18, RoloFanatic said:

Over Christmas I finally decided it was time to try imaging Andromeda (not sure why I left it so long), I had a week and a half off, so plenty of time to wait for the perfect night....... It was cloudy all night, every night apart from a few hours on one evening when I rushed out for a very quick imaging session on Andromeda.

I was aiming to get 2 hours of exposure doing 60 x 2 min exposures however when I went to stack the images I realized that almost half of them were unusable. They had this weird double star effect which I haven't seen before. I thought this was maybe caused by wind making the mount wobble as I use a lightweight camera tripod which makes my setup quite top heavy. But if anyone has another diagnosis please let me know! Example image: 2021-12-26_19-46-02___120.00s_0029.cr2

Anyways, in future I think I will be using shorter 60 second or 30 second exposures to try and increase the proportion of usable frames.

Overall I was really happy with the resulting image, this was the first time I have gone in depth on the processing side of things. I feel I have to give a big thanks to Nebula Photos on youtube who had a great tutorial on processing Andromeda in GIMP. The final image was made up using 32 x 2 min lights, 20 x 2 min darks, 30 bias frames, darks and lights were taken using Nina, stacked in DeepSkyStacker and edited in GIMP and StarNet++. Image taken using WO Z73, iOptron SkyGuider Pro, Canon 600D (unmodified).

 

I have also included the original stacked image if anyone wants to have a go at processing it as well, I would be interested to see anyone can pull out more from this data! Any tips/feedback would be appreciated  

 

Clear skies!

Andromeda removed bad frames manual save 17.01.22.TIF 103.11 MB · 3 downloads

Nice image indeed. I used to do deep sky imaging with my 600D and never bothered with darks. Just lights, dark flats, flats and bias. All very quick to do. 

Edited January 19, 2022 by AstroNebulee