My first shot of the famous M31 (Phil Hoppes)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Andromeda (And) · Contains: Andromeda Galaxy · HD3431 · HD3765 · HD3969 · HD4143 · HD4174 · HD4322 · HD4501 · HD4669 · M 110 · M 31 · M 32 · NGC 205 · NGC 206 · NGC 221 · NGC 224

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My first shot of the famous M31

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My first shot of the famous M31

Well, every astrophotographer gets a shot of M31. I'm no different. So far I have a total of 10 hours of integration time on this object shot from my back yard in Phoenix. First session was 4 hours and last night I added another 6. I was thinking of going for a total of 16 hours but after finishing a first pass on processing with 10 I think I have definitely reached diminishing returns, especially for a city light photograph. Perhaps in much darker skies, I would see more improvement but I'm not seeing it here. That being said it is, of course, a beautiful subject to shoot and I have a benchmark to surpass for my future work and see how I progress. I can think of a few things I could do to improve, possibly with filter or filter selection and processing. It would be nice to get the background darker but I'm not sure how much improvement I can make on that again with city lights. I use PixInsight and DBE in particular to clean up the background. Perhaps with some more training and work I can make some headway there.

Having a blast with my AM5 and AA+ setup and my RedCat51. This is really a pretty awesome portable setup. Looking forward to what I can do with it in the future.

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
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Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
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	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.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6306198
PixInsight job	6OAH5W86RQEJG120Y848JU2FUCK6G2QN
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	00h42m43s.55
RA (top/left)	00h35m21s.35
RA (top/right)	00h36m17s.41
RA (bottom/right)	00h49m49s.55
RA (bottom/left)	00h49m26s.40

Dec (center)	+41°16′01″.8
Dec (top/left)	+42°29′11″.9
Dec (top/right)	+39°53′50″.6
Dec (bottom/right)	+40°01′07″.7
Dec (bottom/left)	+42°36′50″.10

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My first shot of the famous M31

My first shot of the famous M31

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My first shot of the famous M31

My first shot of the famous M31

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