Revisiting the Mighty Andromeda
In the latest glut of imaging data, I spent a few hours collecting on our near neighbour, M31 the Andromeda Galaxy, along with it's companion galaxies M32 and M110. It's a magnificent observational target and the highlight of many a star party. It is though, I find, both hard and easy to image. Easy in terms of, it's fairly straight forward to take an image, but hard in the way that it's so bright at the core that processing using the methods I use rely a lot on trying to mask the centre areas in order to bring out detail on the outer edges. Of course, the other thing with Andromeda is that it is so massive, it easily out measures the field of view of my current imaging rig, with the extremes of the outer arms disappearing off the edge of the image.
My previous attempts at imaging Andromeda over the years have been OK, but I really struggled with the core, and while this effort is by no means spot on, the core looks as best as I have managed compared to any of my other attempts. I expect I will revisit this data further down the line, maybe in the Summer, and experiment with some different processing techniques or colour pallets. For now though, I'm really quite please with the result, particularly when looking at it on a big screen.
The tech bit:
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