Andromeda Galaxy

Finally, some clear nights!

We had a wonderful stretch of three crystal clear nights in a row earlier this month.

I’ve been neglecting my backyard astronomy hobbies since having a kid, and the Pacific Northwest isn’t the most Astro-friendly locale (it gets dark at like 10pm in the summer, and the winter is mostly rain). I noticed that we’d finally have a good stretch of nights so I forced myself to dust off the old astrophotography rig and get out there. Plus I finally got to test out the auto-focuser I bought like six months ago.

Anyways, I got some awesome sessions over these nights. My focus was on M31 (Andromeda), but I ALSO got a couple hours of exposures of the Orion Nebula each night, which I still need to process.

This was a fun one to get me back into the hobby. I think I could improve the editing fairly significantly, but my current process is, “squeeze one edit in between hanging out with my kid”, so I don’t feel bad about where I landed.

I also finally picked up Pixinsight and man is it so much better than Photoshop for my expendable time and current knowledge.

I’ll update this post later to include the gear I used to capture this data.