My first M31. How to improve it?

[Jannis]

here is my first dso of M31 from yesterday, in almost stormy winds.

was taken with: 18 light, 6 dark, ISO 800, 30 sec unguided exposures.

taken with skywatcher explorer 200P DS on HEQ5 pro and canon 550D/T2I unmodded. pica taken in RAW, run trough DSS and tuned a tiny bit on brightness, that's all. then converted to lower res jpg on photoshop at maximum quality. (as the 104MB TIF file was a bit too big to upload ).

this was taken in a small city in norway, not critical light pollunation, but still quite high.

is it possible to make it any sharper, with darker background, and maybe add a bit colour?

[Hawklord]

That's about it for detail from 9 mins at iso800. Looks pretty good. If you can keep adding more subs it will start to show more.

[steppenwolf]

Hi Jannis, this is a very good for such short exposures - the more subframes you include, the better it will become.

I have also had a quick play with your image to sharpen it and bring out a little colour:-

[Cloudwatcher]

You could try applying some light photo filters (colour to taste) without spoiling that nice 'misty' look you have achieved.