Photographing and Processing M31

Hey Gang,

I was out last night taking pictures of M31 at relativly good light conditions, granted the heat. I was producing what I thought to be relativly good raw images, and was excited to come back inside and stack them.

Perhaps I don't quite know how to stack them, but after stacking I seemed to see even less definition than my actual raw images. I was taking 30 second exposures (which I'm not sure are long enough?) and the images below is a combination of 15 of them. I use Registax and the only way I could get the images to line up was to stack manuelly.

All images are taken through a Meade Etx 105, with a DSI Pro Monochrome.

You can see the images aren't the quality I know the DSI Pro is capable of. Is there something I can do to make these images brighter? More contrasted? Or at least so my M31 looks like a galaxy?

(attached to this one is a raw images, and attached to my next post is the stacked)

Attached Image:

Here is the stacked-

30 sec exposures
15 combined through Registax

Attached Image:

You have very bad guiding. That's the reason the images are not stacking properly.

Rolando

Yes, tracking is a big issue here.

But after that, you will need some way to "stretch" the image to display both bright and dim areas. Lots of ways to do that - e.g. log stretch in AstroArt or arcsine import of a FIT into Photoshop. I think the stretch will show you what you were looking for.