M31 - Andromeda Galaxy

I shot this one in December at Comanche Springs, Texas.

TeleVue 85 refractor with reducer/flattener
Losmandy G11 mount
Nikon D100 camera
12X2 minute exposures @ISO1600
aligned and stacked using ImagesPLUS
noise reduction using PaintShop Pro 9
size reduced for quick downloading

Russell

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Russell,
I hope you don't mind, but I took the liberty of adjusting the color balance of your image so that it comes closer to matching the usual colors that we see for M31. Other than that, it's a fine looking image.

dan kowall

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Hi Russell

Beautiful image, thanks for posting.

Ed Roach

I missed the opportunity to shoot M31 this year and was intrigued with the result Russell obtained with the D100. Very well focussed,tracked, assembled and composited. I only thought the balance was off as there were no blue spiral arms and I felt things could be lightened up a tad. I find his data quite excellent and frankly I was surprised with the result I obtained after slight re-balancing of the color.

With Russell's permission it may be found below.

Color balance is something done to an individual's taste with these commercial digicams as there is no way to arrive at an empirical color weighting using standard G2v calibration so my results may not neccessarily be consistent with everyone's expectations.

Using Photoshop CS I selected the arms and reduced the yellow and red sligthly. I then selected the background in an attempt to lighten it slightly with levels and curves. (The data was clipped so I was limited in this operation) Next I selected the blue stars and lowered the saturation in an attempt to minimize the bloating. Then finally used the levels slider to globally adjust the gamma a tad. Your mileage may vary but on my monitor the galaxy is quite pleasing. Nice blue arms and a yellowish core . I also noted how well the camera recorded the hydrogen emission regions in the galaxy.

Russell's image contained alot of good data to work with. Looks like his camera is quite nice with brighter DSO's. Now a large format CCD looks unneccesaary as these commercial cameras are capable of such results.

Mike

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