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 |
