Andromeda Galaxy (eacron)

Andromeda Galaxy

This is my first what I would call successful attempt at astrophotography. As can be seen I have a long and exciting road of improvement ahead of me.

This was taken on a front yard of a family members home under bortle 4 skies.

This is a crop from the result of a stack of 39 subs at 60 sec exposure and iso 800 with a 135mm Nikkor f/2.8 lens on a Nikon D7500 and used the Star Adventurer for tracking. Each image was preprocessed for chromatic aberration in Rawtherapee stacked in Siril and Postprocessed for removal of light pollution and stretching in Gimp using Roger Clarks workflow (as best I could). No dark, flat, or bias frame subtraction.

I'm happy with my tracking but as can be seen there is considerable chromatic aberration. As I have seen a number of gorgeous results on astrobin using the same lens I doubt that the lens is to blame. I will focus my next attempt at getting better focus. For this result I had simply put the lens at infinity. The stars looked like small sharp points but maybe I can do better. Also, I realize now I have not taken enough subs. I will most likely triple that number in my next attempt.

Otherwise, please critique - I can use all the help and suggestions I can get!

Thank you and clear skies.
Eli

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	n/a
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Astrometry.net job	n/a
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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