Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Andromeda (And)  ·  Contains:  Andromeda galaxy  ·  Great Nebula in Andromeda  ·  M 110  ·  M 31  ·  M 32  ·  NGC 205  ·  NGC 206  ·  NGC 221  ·  NGC 224
Messier 31, first try at using my telescope, Connor Matherne
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Messier 31, first try at using my telescope

Messier 31, first try at using my telescope, Connor Matherne
Powered byPixInsight

Messier 31, first try at using my telescope

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Hey everyone! Tonight was the first night I took my scope out. It was a nice change from wide field shots and planetary.

No darks/flats/bias frames, no time

Location was on the border of a Bortle 6-7, pretty poor, but I couldn't make the drive to the observatory.

Processing in PixInsight followed this workflow:

* stack

* cropped / rotated to make it the *right* way ;)

* Automatic Background Extraction

* SCNR to remove excess green

* Color Calibration

* Background Neutralization

* Stretched Histogram

* TGV Denoise

* Local Histogram Equalization

* Saturation curves on the stars

* Finally messed around with lightness, RGBk, and saturation curves

Pretty happy with how it turned out. Really wish I could have made the drive to darker skies and had more time to image, but for a first try, I am definitely okay with how it turned out. More light subs as well as darks, flats, and biases would definitely help the quality. I also took a picture of M57 last night as well. Here is the final image from it. http://i.imgur.com/n5NHCic.jpg

Still learning how to edit, if you have any tips for either editing, or taking pictures, please let me know.

Thanks

Image revision: Tried a different work flow. One of the major changes was extracting the luminance and reapplying it to the image which brought out a ton of color. This meant I didn't have to touch my saturation slider at all, which led to a cleaner image over all I think.

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Sky plot

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Messier 31, first try at using my telescope, Connor Matherne