Thursday, August 8, 2013

M31 and the Sun

Skies haven't been cooperating for the last couple of weeks. I managed to start imaging M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. I started this project on July 4, and 1 month later have still not completed it. Here's what I have so far:
 
Luminance 10x10 minute
Red-6x10 minute
Green-5x10 minute
Blue 3x10 minute
Captured with:
QHY9M & AT65EDQ

I need to capture more frames, especially blue. I'd like to add some Ha and longer luminance subs as well. I've processed my data a bunch of times and I can't seem to find what I'm looking for. Maybe more data will help. Below is my "original" version, same data, different processing
 


I've processed the data I have so far about a dozen times. Here's a comparison of the different processing I used
 










Hopefully the skies clear up soon so I can finish this.

Below are several images of M31 I took in August-Dec 2011, when I started Astrophotography. They were taken with my 8" SCT & a Canon T3i.

 


 


I also managed to catch a pretty cool solar prominence with my PST & QHY5L-II on July 26. Here's the still image followed by an animation I created:
 
 

This is a 36 frame animation. Each frame was created from 14 second videos containing 500 frames stacked in Registax6. The resulting TIFF images were combined in Photoshop CS6.
Videos acquired with a Coronado PST SS & a QHY5L-II
The entire event took close to 60 minutes

4 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Thanks Terry! I haven't had any imaging time lately, clouds and rain....

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  2. Glad to see you had an opportunity out under the skies again Chuck. I've been fighting the weather gods myself too often this past year! Looks great so far!

    Best Regards,

    Jeff

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  3. Thanks Jeff! The forecast is for a couple of decent days coming up, but that will change I'm sure

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