Capturing Andromeda

M31, The Andromeda Galaxy is a real challenge to image. It's bright and easy to see, even with the naked eye, but this brings it's own challenges. As a photographic target it's difficult because the centre is very bright but the outer edges show some very subtle detail which is on visible with long exposures. To image it is a real challenge.

I am not really a DSO photographer but have been wanting to get into this area of Astrophotography for a while. I usually prefer to shoot the Moon and Planets. The challenge is my scope (a SW200P) is a bit of an all rounder, my DSLR's are Nikon's (yes, I prefer Nikon's not Canon's - sacrilege amongst most Astrophotographer's I know) and I don't have a guided scope, I use a simple dual axis drive which means getting a decent Polar alignment, often harder than you would think. Anyway, I thought it was time to give it a go.

This week we had two clear nights in a row, unheard of for the West coast of Scotland, so I set up in my garden both nights. To counter my lack of guiding I decided to take 30 second exposures, the downside means lot's of separate images. Roughly translated that means lot's of time sitting in a chair next to the scope clicking the remote. After shooting darks and lights I must have had around 400 photos to process, with about an hour and a half of actual 'lights' or image data.

Next comes the processing. To be honest, imaging is the easy part in some respects as processing is more an art than a science. I used Deep Sky Stacker to align and stack my images and then I use Gimp to process. This image of M31 took me hours and hours, often going back and starting again... very frustrating! After a  long time I settled on a final image and this is the one shown below. Its not quite as sharp as I would like but it shows some nice dust lanes in the outer edges of the Galaxy. For a first proper go at a DSO I am quite pleased with it. Hopefully my technique will improve over time.