My first M31

[Astroblagger]

This is my first attempt at the Andromeda galaxy, No where as good as many as i see on here but hey its a start! About 30 mins of exposure (taken about 25 min drive outside a major city so LP around) taken with megrez, canon 450D, cls clip forgot to put the camera to raw mode when i started so just jpg's to stack. Iv done very little processing of deepsky objects so, any help, comments and advice to improve the image are welcome.

[kris h]

Looks great Astro

[Beyond_Vision]

A great start Astro , a lot better than my first attempts

Regards

Kevin

[steppenwolf]

That's a great start - you should be very pleased with that one.

[Dave S]

Lokking good.

Dave...

[hograt]

Very good first attempt, with plenty of detail captured! There is more in the image that can be teased out with processing, it's a case of experimenting. One way to do this would be to boost the levels and adjust the curves. This will also bring out background noise and one suggestion to reduce this would be to take some more exposures (sky and time permitting) to improve the signal to noise ratio. It's much better than tweaking with software.

As a general rule, the more individual exposures the better. Sometimes it is difficult to fit everything in one night so I often plan several session on an object over consecutive night (sometimes weeks) and built up the data until I'm happy with the result. M31 was one of my first DSO's imaged with a DSLR and the effort paid off for me as it now hangs framed on the wall of my study. You've done better than my first attempt (and many others on here) and if you continue to collect data (exposures) you'll have an image which "will be as good as the best one here".

Best regards

Martin

[Astroblagger]

Thanks for the comments, When you say boost the levels what exactly do you mean? I really know ziltch about processing i just put it in photoshop and messed about to darken the image. Also if imaging on consecutive nights and you need to stack images from a previous night will they not be misaligned? Or does the camera have to have exactly the same orientation etc?

[brantuk]

That's a great start Astroblag - deffo heading in the right direction

[Bizibilder]

Exellent start!! Yes you can stack images from different nights. The "framing" has to be reasonably consistent - but you can crop the rough edges!

[Coco]

Good start... this is a difficult target and you have done well with it..

[Dave]

A nice start.

Keep it going.