AstroBinAstroBin
Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Andromeda (And)  ·  Contains:  Andromeda Galaxy  ·  M 110  ·  M 31  ·  M 32  ·  NGC 205  ·  NGC 221  ·  NGC 224
First image of Andromeda - Ubehebe Crater, California, Christian Adame
First image of Andromeda - Ubehebe Crater, California
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First image of Andromeda - Ubehebe Crater, California

Revision title: What a difference two years makes

Link: https://www.instagram.com/p/CW7j1RUFpAK/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
First image of Andromeda - Ubehebe Crater, California, Christian Adame
First image of Andromeda - Ubehebe Crater, California
Powered byPixInsight

First image of Andromeda - Ubehebe Crater, California

Revision title: What a difference two years makes

Link: https://www.instagram.com/p/CW7j1RUFpAK/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

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Description

After visiting Amboy Crater for the first time in 2021, my obsession with astrophotography and the California desert at large started. I visited Amboy in June, and visited Death Valley National Park for the first time about half a year later in mid November. The first target through my telescope, a Skywatcher Quattro 200p, and imaged with an unmodified Canon T6i, was the Andromeda Galaxy. I was shocked when I took an exposure of about three minutes and managed to get this result. I still consider this image alongside the shot of the Orion Nebula I took shortly after, the peak of my deep sky astrophotography career, though in the two years since I have been steadily learning more and more.

My landscape astrophotography has certainly improved since my first visit to Death Valley, but I hope to eclipse my deep sky personal best over the next few short weeks. Still equipped with the same Newtonian and unmodded DSLR, and heading back out to Amboy once more, but this time with a coma corrector, a guide scope, and NINA to help. Depending on the time I have (power availability might restrict me) I might attempt a mosaic shot of Andromeda as I cannot fill its entirety in a single frame. My current primary targets are the Great Hercules Cluster and the Ring Nebula, but so long as I have battery power remaining, I will attempt roughly twenty to thirty minutes of integration time per panel for a four-panel mosaic, and hope to compare the results.

Ideally, I should see obvious improvement, though on a purely personal level, this first image of Andromeda will always be the most important to me, as it was then that I truly fell in love with the wonders of the universe in a way that even being under the dark skies of Amboy didn't allow.

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  • First image of Andromeda - Ubehebe Crater, California, Christian Adame
    Original
  • Final
    First image of Andromeda - Ubehebe Crater, California, Christian Adame
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Title: What a difference two years makes

Description: Out of curiousity I decided to reprocess the images I shot of Andromeda back in 2021. Sadly, I lost the RAW files so I was stuck stacking JPGs, taken at different ISOs and exposure times. But this is more a personal comparison, I shot one hour of Andromeda from home with a telephoto lens, vs a little over 5 minutes from dark skies and a Newtonian, and even considering that its a poor stack of JPG the details are vastly clearer. Noise and fuzz are an issue of course, again this was a short integration time done with different settings and stacked raw, and yet its still superior to what I managed from home with proper subexposures.

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First image of Andromeda - Ubehebe Crater, California, Christian Adame
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