M31 - Andromeda Galaxy

First light with my new William Optics RedCat51. 250mm focal length at f/4.9.  Also first light with my new William Optics Uniguide 32mm guidescope and ZWO ASI220MM Mini guide camera.

*** UPDATE***  New revision includes another three nights (13.5 hours worth) of one-shot color data and drizzled.  Still want to add H-alpha at some point.

This initially was just going to be a quick test at an easy target, but the data looked clean, so I let it run for short while longer, taking 24 sub-frames of 120 seconds each for a total integration time of 48 minutes.  I'm amazed at how much good data I got from less than one hour of integration time.

The setup worked flawlessly. I bought a new ZWO EAF (my third) to permanently mount in the ProAstroGear BlackCat mounting bracket and that seemed to work quite well to focus, although I lowered the step size to the minimum 10 since the focuser was quick.

I installed a filter drawer, but the moon wasn't up so I didn't use a filter for this run.

This is my new widefield rig and I need to get/make a container so I can take it on the road fully assembled. First light was extremely promising and I can't wait to image other targets that I can't see from my house.

On the processing side, I also tried some new tools and techniques.  This was my first time using PixInsight for almost all of the processing. I normally use AstroPixelProcessor to stack, register, normalize, remove light pollution, correct colors and stretch, then take into PixInsight.

Also first time using new NoiseXTerminator, StarXTerminator and GradientXTerminator, as well as Bill Blanshan's star reduction scripts.  Finally, I tried the new Spectrophotometric Color Calibration (SPCC) tool, as I previously adjusted colors in APP.  I left the colors as SPCC gave me without any further color balancing and think it looks pretty natural. The only change to the color that I made was to increase vibrancy and saturation which is my preference.  

In all, it took much longer to process this than actual imaging time and I plan to add more data to this target with this setup, including some H-alpha data.