M31 Andromeda galaxy (Miska Saarikko)

M31 Andromeda galaxy

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

M31 Andromeda galaxy

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

I finally managed to get things to work after ordering a Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer Pro, William Optics Redcat 51/250 f/4.9 and a T ring for Nikon F, despite having a Nikon Z6 (and used the FTZ adapter).

I went on a short weekend trip to a dark area, rented a house in the middle of nowhere. Sunday night was cloudfree and the only opportunity for me to test the rig for the first time.

Settled everything up, aligned the tracker towards Polaris, mounted the telescope and camera, searched for M31 Andromeda on the nightsky although the moon was lit up to the right from me and set the remote (intervalometer) timer to capture exposures on the camera.

Went indoors and after 15 minutes or so I had a bad feeling about the settings, so I went out to check things up and noticed that the camera haven't captured more than 5 shots at 90 sec each and the upcoming shots were stacked in exposure time (one was at 190 sec and the second that I killed in the middle was around 200 sec). Tried several settings and none worked, it kept stacking time on top of each other. Third attempt was up at 113 sec and due to my frustration the tracking got out of alignment for a second so I managed to get doublicates of all stars.

So, I had only 5 good shots to play with after getting tired of nothing worked as planned and I came home, registered and stacked the images in SiRiL and edited in Photoshop as good as I could.

Here's my first attempt on Andromeda galaxy with the rig and with my own edit of it.

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Status	n/a
Started	n/a
Astrometry.net job	n/a
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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M31 Andromeda galaxy

M31 Andromeda galaxy

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M31 Andromeda galaxy

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