This beautiful galaxy has set me a quest - to take a beautiful image of it! I'm getting there slowly!
Now high in the East, Andromeda can be found easily even with binoculars, it is seen as a fuzzy blur. Trying to image it is a challenge as the object is large and the swirls and dust lanes are quite feint.
On the 14th September the sky was perfectly clear and I now have the leads for my camera to run dslr shutter. This means that I can set up the telescope, track my target and take multiple timed exposures with the camera. I decided to take about 100 x 30 second exposures of the Andromeda Galaxy. I set up the equipment and then left it to take the photos automatically controlled by my laptop. I set the format this time for RAW in the hope that I might get a better resolution than the normal JPG format.
Well, all kinds of things started to go wrong....clouds...battery went down in the camera...tracking motor stopped. In the end I managed about 70 exposures and then stacked them in Deepskystacker.
The result above is after hours of processing and stacking.
I have the images in FIT format as well and i'm sure the results will be super in a suitable FITs processor, but I can't seem to get one working! Still, something to play with later perhaps!
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