Andromeda M31 - first successful attempt
This weekend we had the pleasure to borrow Jonas cottage on south easter Öland, which we very thankful for! One of the goals was to go birding.
But this cottage is also situated in a Bortle class 2 area. Having access to those dark skies literally at the doorstep of a warm cottage, clear skies and a 6% moon called for some astro photo.
In the center you can clearly see the Andromeda Galaxy. M110 is to the right of the galactic nucleus. M32 looks a bit weak though. Nu Andromedae is also easy to see.
Technical details
I’ve made some unsuccessful attempts previously at taking stacked deep-sky object photos, but failed so far. This is the first successful attempt!
The image is taken with a 17-50mm ƒ/2.8 lens on a regular tripod. Here’s the setup:
| Focal length | 50mm |
| Aperture | ƒ/3.2 |
| ISO | 6400 |
| Exposure time for light frames | 200 * 2s |
| Dark frames | 50 |
| Flat frames | 50 |
| Bias frames | 50 |
The raw photos were stacked using DSS, and then lightly post-processed in Siril (stretching, background extraction) and cropped.
There’s definitely some room for improvement. The image seems to be a bit out of focus, which should be solvable with a Bahtinov mask. And the post-processing can definitely be improved, there’s still a lot to learn there.