The Andromeda Galaxy (AKA M31) is a barred spiral galaxy that is approximately 2.5 million light years from Earth and measures 152 thousand light years across. The galaxy is home to as many as a trillion stars and many of its larger nebula are visible by zooming into the image. Andromeda is on a collision course with our Milky Way Galaxy within the next 4-5 billion years.
Processing performed entirely within PixInsight using the following steps:
- WBPP
- DBE
- BlurXTerminator Nonstellar then Stellar
- Bill Blanshan PixelMath Unlinked Stretch on L and Linked Stretch on RGB
- StarXTerminator
- NoiseXTerminator
- HDRMultiscaleTransform
- LocalHistogramEqualization
- MultiscaleLinearTransform
- LRGB Combination
- Curves
- Bill Blanshan ModifiedSCNR on Stars
- Re-screened stars
I travelled to a Bortle 2 dark sky site to capture the data for this image. I probably wasted a few hours of integration time on the RGB channels at the remote site. The plan moving forward for broadband targets is to focus entirely on capturing luminance data from a dark sky site and capture all the other channels from the backyard. Luminance suffers the most from light pollution, but it can be difficult to get all the channels (LRGB etc.) on a single trip so this plan maximizes the strengths of the dark sky site while also allowing flexibility with the backyard setup.
Mouse over for starless version.
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