Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Andromeda (And)  ·  Contains:  Great Nebula in Andromeda  ·  M 31  ·  M 32  ·  NGC 221  ·  NGC 224
Andromeda again..., Eric W. Gregory
Andromeda again...
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Andromeda again...

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Description

Another stack of images of Andromeda. I tried processing everything a bit differently. Instead of using dark frames for this one, I used "astro noise" reduction in Nikon NX-D, and cranked the overall noise reduction up to 70 (of 100). Additionally, I used Nikon's Pic Control settings set to "neutral," modified the black point slightly, then exported to 16 bit .tif files.

From there, into Nebulosity 4 went everything. I used 20 bias frames and 20 flats, batch processed, then normalized, and finally stacked. From there I stretched things a little bit in Nebulosity, then imported to Lightroom where I further tweaked black point and exposure.

To make a long story longer, I'm more satisfied with this one than the other shots I've done so far. It turns out that doing dark frames with a Nikon D7100 isn't needed and actually seems to make images more difficult to process. The noise reduction functions in NX-D seem to be an absolute must if you shoot Nikon. The results (so far) seem to be quite superior than using actual dark frames.

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Andromeda again..., Eric W. Gregory