In the midst of an all night session at White Mound County Park, Sauk County, WI, I snapped about 1h 28m of data on Andromeda. This is an unguided composition, with no flats or darks, taken on a Polemaster aligned Meade LX85 GEM, using a Vixen ED81s doublet APO refractor, a 0.7 reducer, and a Ha sensitive Nikon D5600 DSLR at 6 ISO 800 x 5 minute exposures and 29 ISO 1600 x 2 minute exposures.
Development of the final .tif file went through PixInsight to DxO Photolab, and finally through Astroflat Pro.
Despite the warnings of smoke, the smoke and cloud forecasts showed windows of opportunity, and they proved to be good - as the final Sky Quality reading when I got to White Mound County Park was 21.25, which is a solid Bortle 4, which is more like a 2 of 5 but still fine enough to show the arms of the Milky Way and Andromeda well enough.
What I find especially interesting in this image is how far I've progressed in development. I intentionally shot unguided partially since it was easier, but secondarily because my first Andromeda image I shared a year ago on Astribin was unguided. If you compare this to that earlier shot, I've definately improved in processing and acquisition in a major way, using a DSLR and same mount. Check it out, would you agree?
https://astrob.in/2uelmj/0/
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