M31, an old familiar friend (Rob Foster)

M31, an old familiar friend

Revision title: M31, Revised with SPCC, Croman Tools and GHS

100 is just a number, but I wanted my 100th image on Astrobin to mean something a bit more, at least to me. Some of my earliest memories of stargazing during childhood were the incredibly dark skies of northern Michigan, and I still remember the sense of discovery seeing Andromeda with eccentric gaze with the naked eye, and then the amazement of seeing this galaxy in binoculars for the first time. No doubt this target is well-represented on Astrobin and elsewhere, but I have enjoyed the past two years learning how to better capture and process these challenging targets with a DSLR. These images were captured on consecutive nights with a waxing moon, and it is interesting to go back and compare this image to what I was able to produce a year ago. I look forward to doing it all again with a dedicated astrocam in the hopefully not to distant future, supply chain not withstanding! Another processing note, once again, following very similar workflows, the color and contrast management processing with the undrizzled image was dramatically better than the drizzled image. Not sure why, as the images were all very well dithered (every 3 frames). For some reason I cannot figure out, the drizzled images have been much more difficult to get right with regards to color, although this was not always the case. It seems as though my difficulties began after drizzle was integrated into WBPP, but I don't think that is the issue, I am sure it must be something I am doing wrong.

Original
B
C
Final
D

C

Title: M31, adjusted background

Description: Not sure how I missed it but there was a distracting amount of back color that detracted from the image; saw it on a brighter screen and was surprised. As it turns out, I had turned out the brightness on the processing computer a day or two ago so (? maybe longer) and was developing to that level. Lesson learned.

Uploaded: ...

D

Title: M31, Revised with SPCC, Croman Tools and GHS

Description: Wow. This is the same drizzled data that gave me fits with the first version. I wasn't thrilled with the "fried egg" appearance of the version 3, and seeing Adam Block's M31 post was an inspiration to try again. With SPCC and then separate development of the stars and the galaxy detail with SXT, the background sky was much easier to manage and there was a surprising amount of H-alpha data hiding and unstretched in previous versions.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6893333
PixInsight job	JCRNCA2IXYDSC5GTV6R92L68861ZXYA0
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	00h42m38s.57
RA (top/left)	00h46m26s.28
RA (top/right)	00h46m40s.87
RA (bottom/right)	00h38m43s.20
RA (bottom/left)	00h38m44s.21

Dec (center)	+41°14′26″.4
Dec (top/left)	+40°07′01″.4
Dec (top/right)	+42°20′49″.5
Dec (bottom/right)	+42°21′41″.0
Dec (bottom/left)	+40°07′51″.2

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