You’ll be relieved to hear that this is my last image after a spell of clear, if hot, nights in the UK. No masterpiece, rather a sketch to try out a mosaic with my new setup, before heading North to darker skies next weekend. Actually more of a ‘storyboard’, so if you are interested, please read on…
Data comprising 45 x 60s exposures of M31, the Great Andromeda Galaxy, were collected for each panel in Ivo Stoylov’s excellent
APT, which seamlessly interfaces to Han Klein’s powerful astrometric solving and stacking program,
ASTAP, for visual display in his planetarium software,
HNSKY. A mosaic of 3 panels provided sufficient field of view, and ASTAP stitched these together after a while, producing a whopping 1.3 Gigabyte file! I did have to crop and overlap the frames to remove most of the stitching artifacts, but generally this worked well.
Gradients were inevitable under such a bright moon, which washed out the sky (and any chance of seeing a Perseid meteor) and impossible to remove. Nevertheless I posted this as part of my journey, and hopefully to encourage others to explore mosaics for high resolution astroimaging. A combination of exposures will be needed to reveal the full majesty of this galaxy and her neighbours - 60s for the core and star field, 120s for the main disk and perhaps 300s for the blue star clouds and emission nebulae that dot the outer edges.
Nebulosity 4 struggled to bring out the detail without the background gradients, nevertheless I prefer this simple processing, to a more saturated attempt with Startools. I can't wait to setup under a dark sky again... here's hoping.
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