The Session-Story of the Andromeda Galaxy
I struggled around with the flattener for a few months now and i was still not happy with the results. But i found a config that seemed to be ok for now and i wanted to test the performance in the field on a real picture. The Andromeda Galaxy was my target.
I had two evenings to see how it worked. The final picture is the only RGB result from the first evening. On the second evening i used the duo narrowband filter with the idea to show the H-Alpha regions. But i was not able to use that material in a useful way.
Here the high resolution Astrophoto on Flickr:

Lessons Learned – Andromeda Galaxy
- It is fun to just shoot some astrophotos.
- The flattener config is not that bad.
- Only one evening of RGB at F7.5 on M31 is too few.
- I am not able to use H-Alpha material on a RGB galaxy photo yet. So I will hopefully upload an update soon.
- I worked homofocal … more in another posting.
Technical overview
Telescope | VIXEN ED80sf |
Focal Length | 600mm |
Aperture ratio | 7.5 |
Erecting Lense | TSFlat2 |
Filter | Optolong UV/IR Cut bzw. Optolong L-Extreme |
Mount | Skywatcher HEQ-5 |
Goto-Control | EKOS |
Mount Control | INDI |
Guiding Scope Focal Length | 162 mm |
Guiding Camera Chip | 4.8mm x 3.6mm, 8bit |
Guiding Camera Resolution | 1280×960 |
Guiding Software | EKOS, INDI |
Dithering | 3 pixel |
Camera | CANON EOS M100(a) |
Method | focal projection |
Camera Control | EKOS, INDI, Gphoto2 |
Photography Date | 22.11.2021 RGB 24.11.2021 H-Alpha, OIII |
Exposure-Time Lights | 31x180s RGB 23x180s H-Alpha, OIII |
Sensitivity | ISO 800 |
Calibrationframes | Flats, Biases |
Post Processing Date | 26.11.2021, only RGB |
Stacking, Integration | Affinity Photo |
Post Processing Software | Affinity Photo |
Image Editing | Affinity Photo |
Capture Place | Koblenz, Germany |
Lightpollution | Bortle 5 |
Scattered light | strong |