Neighbours, M31 The Andromeda Galaxy

It was a last minute decision to venture out into my back garden yesterday to see what could be accomplished with imaging the Andromeda Galaxy again. Setup went smoothly and my polar alignment appeared to be spot on with the Astrotrac Polar Scope. Trained my Canon 400D, Canon 70-300mm lens initially on the 70mm setting so I could effectively find M31, by taking 30 second expoure and inspecting the downloaded image on my laptop. Once found, I adjusted the position of the camera so it was centered in my field of view and then zoomed in on it. I found that at 300mm aberrations ruined the details of the stars and so took it back to 190mm where stars were now accepable. I had to use a piece of cellotape to stop the lens from sliding back to 70. I took 101 images at 30 second expoures, f/5.6 and after those I took 11 darks.

I stacked them in DeepSkySkyStacker and then played around with the levels and curves for each Red, Green and Blue channels to bring out all the detail.

And here is a cropped image.

I am so pleased I got this one since I wasn't actually expecting to go out last night.