Collecting Photons

M31 Andromeda

North is to the right. Roll over to see the HII areas disappear! 1600x1069

Objects: The great Andromeda galaxy

Constellation: Andromeda

Coordinates of field center: 0h 43m +41° 19'

Notes: bright but difficult subject. Here I went for a drastic enhancement of the details of the thousands of features visible in the arms and I tried to keep a range of colors as wide as possible. The image is less soft than my habit but I'll keep it this way for a while.

Telescope and camera: ASA 10', f 3.6; SBIG STL 11000.

Exposure: Luminance 25x8'; R, B 6x10''; G 6x8"; Hα 27x16". About 13 hrs in total.

Date: 2 nights on November 2009 plus 2 nights on 22 and 23 September 2010 for the narrowband data.

Software used: acquisition, CCDsoft. Calibration; registration and stacking: CCDstack, Iris; processing: PixInsight, Photoshop CS.

I used multiple instances of multiscale filtering to enhance the tremendous amount of details present in the spiral arms. To improve the representation of the details nearby the galaxy nucleus I subtracted a starless, low passed luminance image to improve the dynamic range of the luminance variation occurring at the top of the histogram. The dust lanes of the central part of the galaxy can be seen here at full resolution

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Send anything that comes to mind to Gimmi Ratto gimmi@in.cnr.it