Messier 31 - Andromeda Galaxy

COMMENTS
Andromeda can be an object very easy to photograph if you're looking for an average image of the galaxy. But to do one that stands from the pack, even if just a little bit, can become a daunting task. My goal this time was to do a better-than-average Andromeda, and to do that I focused mainly in three areas:

• Getting as much detail from the core as possible.
• Trying to nicely capture the H-Alpha and possibly the blue star forming regions.
• Get good colors!

For the first goal, first I worked with several different exposure times at different ISO settings. I had to take some trial and error shots until I found the balance with sessions of two minutes exposures at both ISO 800 and ISO 400. Then, of course, during processing, wavelet processing and overlay of these short-exposure sessions over the longer-exposed image came to the rescue.

To enhance the H-Alpha (red) and blue star forming regions I used a chromatic mask and worked the curves and saturation of only those chromatic areas.

Finally, capturing a color that would make me happy was truly a trial-and-error process.

Having said that, I did notice a few terrible mistakes made during processing. First of all, the NR I applied did wash out some of the detail in the galaxy, unfortunately. Also, at some point in the processing I think I "killed" some stars by leaving them excessively flat. And last, it looks like during stacking, the blue channel wasn't properly aligned in the top-left corner, as it can be seen in the stars in that corner. This by the way is not the first time DSS (the software I used to do the stacking) does this to me.

But in general I am very happy with the results. Sure I had data there to come up with a better final image, but that's always true for any astrophoto. About 10 hours went into processing this image!

PS: The current version is a post-processing done on November 31st from the last processed image