Sunday 18 October 2009

M31 - 7.5 Hours

Whilst the data was being captured for my M31 image. I spotted Orion and grabbed the 15x70's for a quick look. M42 and M43 were clear, and I could see the wings of M42 stretching off to either side, I even spotted where the running man is (even if I couldn't see the Neb itself)... and had a quick wander around the area.

I also saw my fourth (or should that be fifth, if you include the Earth) planet of the night... Mars was up (below Gemini)...


Anyway onto the image... I lost about an hours worth of capture time when my secondary camera battery ran out, and I hadn't realised... ho hum. After stacking... it took a fair while... with 76 lights and 33 flats, I didn't take darks, or add bias frames...

And processing and some cosmetic tweaking in PS I ended up with



I'm really happy with that result... although I'm sure another 2 or 3 hours of capture time would finish it off nicely.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That's excellent John. But who are you stealing the clear skies from?

Well, me for one! :)

You mentioned you were looking at the Milky Way visually in a very recent post - I haven't seen the Milky Way in 50(ish) years. I think I need to move from West Yorkshire :)