At last month's new moon I was experimenting to see if I could do something wider field. I put my .67 focal reducer on my refractor and did a 4-panel mosaic of Andromeda.
You can see some interesting detail if you click on the image to get a higher resolution version. The processing turned out to be extremely challenging, since the light pollution gradients made stitching the panels together extremely difficult. I learned a lot about the PixInsight DBE tool used to minimize the gradients, but despite spending a lot of time on it, the seams are still visible if you look.
People we must stop this poor man. He can't be using science to get these views, he must have gone over to the dark side. It's witchcraft I tell you, WITCHCRAFT!!
Andy, I don't care if you ARE an alien imager from outer space, I just enjoy changing my screen saver to your images all the time. Thanks again for sharing your fine work.
Frank N
Stellarvue 80mm APO, Skyguider Pro, Celestron AVX
"I'm a seeker too. But my dreams aren't like yours. I can't help thinking that somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man. Has to be"
Thanks for the compliments and encouragement, all!
Apollo XX wrote:So I just poked it up to full size to have a look around...is that spiral arm detail I'm seeing in M110???
Here's a crop of M110 from the image.
There is definitely something there in the data. I tried some extreme stretching to bring it out.
The data is too noisy and I think too low resolution to get much detail. It would be interesting to image M110 at longer focal length and longer exposure time to better capture the details.
There's also at least one distant galaxy in the background in the image above, like the one between 9 and 10-o'clock.
