Holiday Snap of M31

[tmarkuk]

I made it home from Italy yesterday, and took some time out this evening to take a look at the images I took whilst away. I ended up getting two nights worth of imaging in, though with clear mountain skies I wish I had had more, but small boys don't let Daddy sleep in when there are castles to explore.

I took my Vixen Sphinx mount and a William Optics ZS66SD with the Mark II 0.8x reducer / flattener, I spent both evenings imaging M31 as that was the best object visible in the gap between trees where I could get everything plugged in. I used my Canon EOS1000d without any filters.

The image is composed of 92 x 2.5m exposures plus darks and flats, aligned and stacked in Iris (a first for me) and processed in photoshop. I'm sure some time spent in more expert hands could improve the result somewhat though. I can't seem to get quite the contrast levels I would like from it and it loses some depth because of it.

All comments, and advice greatfully recieved!

Tim.

[Beyond_Vision]

Looks like you had a great holiday with a couple of evenings well spent. You have some very good data there and I suspect there is more to be squeezed out of it. The black level is clipped so you are loosing some of the fainter stuff and the RGB levels need balancing.

Regards

Kevin

[Tim]

Oooh, there's some nice data there! M31 is one of the trickiest things to process in the deep sky catalog I reckon, and you could spend hours and hours on it.

you are right though, there is a lot more that could be brought out of this image. Try not to use brightness/contrast controls, rather set the black points with the levels tool, and raise the brightness with curves. Little by little is best.

Nice pic though.

TJ

[tmarkuk]

Right then, I'm back with this one with a pixinsight re-edit. It no longer looks like a galaxy composed entirely of pick'n'mix. Got to say, I've fallen in love with pixinsight, I used Harrys video tutorials to get in the swing of things - www.harrysastroshed.com.

Hopefully that shows some major signs of improvement!

[gary1968]

Stunning, the detail is deffo there, dust lanes, colours and pin point stars.

Thanks for sharing.

Gary

[Beyond_Vision]

Thats made a world of difference the first image was clipped heavily on the black point and oversaturated. The edit in Pix-Insight has done wonders with it. One to be proud of . The only thing I would suggest is uping the colour saturation or using the Gabany method of colour enchancement

Stargazer - A Private Observatory In The Heart Of Europe

Regards

Kevin

[MartinB]

That looks like a terrific set of data Tim. You can have many happy hours on cloudy nights playing with it. Somewhere between the 2 I would have thought

[themos]

What an improvement! I hope my 2 hours of data give me something like this.

[tmarkuk]

Last one I think, anything after this will just be experimentation.

I shall name this image 'perseverance'. At least I know what I want for Christmas now.

[Coco]

Sweet... really nice images.

I going to have to bight the proverbial bullet and buy Pixinsight.

Damn i need registar also

Guy..

[ollypenrice]

Hey, good work. First, well done for not trying to image six objects in the time. You have, as a result, got yourself a serious one. This is indeed a surprizingly hard object and, boy, have you ever got close in to the core with this. Very close indeed. No big white blob in the middle.

Impressive.

Olly

[tmarkuk]

Here's a close up of the centre from the full size original.

I think I'm going to be spending the next few week re-processing everything I have taken in pixinsight.

[harry page]

Hi

Glad the video's were of help

Some times after using hdr wavlets a small contrast use of curves will help and also there is a dark structure enhance under scripts which might help the dust lanes.

Great job and improvement

regards harry

[tmarkuk]

Many thanks for all your hard work on them Harry, they were a breeze to follow!

That dark structures script is awesome, a definite improvement though you have to be careful not to make the background blotchy. I will however refrain from posting yet another copy of the same image in here!

[peter shah]

love the reprocess....showing some great detail in the outer edges....well worth the time spent