I've been trying my hand at Astrophotography for almost a year now. Lots of sleepless nights and money has been spent. I am rewarded with awe for our universe every night though, and I am starting to get some decent images.

Last night, I imaged the Andromeda Galaxy, our nearest galactic neighbor. This was the first "object" I imaged during my first night of astrophotography on October 15, 2018.

The scope I used last night is a far cry from the old soviet 300mm Tair 3 lens I used for my first photographs, but that old lens hooked me. I am now pretty much addicted.

Anyway, here is a shot of the core of Andromeda. This is 6.5 hours of imaging using a cooled mono camera and 5 filters.

Lum: 60, 60 second images 1x1 Bin
Red: 80, 60 second images 2x2 Bin
Green: 80, 60 second images 2x2 Bin
Blue: 80, 60 second images 2x2 Bin
H-Alpha: 30, 180 second images 2x2 Bin





And for those interested, here is my first astrophoto, my first shot of Andromeda, taken almost a year ago.

[MarkJerling]

Very nice work. My hat off to you!

[Cee Cee]

very impressive, I love looking at space images
cheers

[PJ1]

Another great shot. And what a lot of work went in to it!!

[K2 to K50]

I am envious - you get to space travel with your camera. I would not be able to garner either the equipment, or the patience. Must engender great personal satisfaction, being able to get shots like these.

[Dan Paris]

very, very nice ! It would be great if you manage to do a full mosaic of the galaxy with such amount of details

[Grippy]

Very nice mate, great work

[savoche]

Great result! One has to invest a lot of time and effort to get images as good as this. I have to remind myself every time I start drooling over some telescope or other while envisioning the amazing images I will make...

Added to that the fact that one has to stay up at night (imagine that!), has to have good seeing conditions (light pollution, anyone?), has to have quite good equipment (and let's face it, photography is cheap compared to astronomy) - and even if I were in a good location, nights are dark only in winter, and seeing is good only when there's no clouds (duh). When there's no clouds in winter it's freezing cold where I live. I don't like cold. At all. And neither do electronic gadgets and batteries, complicating things further.

And yet it's hard to drop the idea when it has first germinated...

Umm, my point was really that amazing astro photography doesn't come easily. Kudos!

[aaronjamesgray]

Fantastic, I love it.

[bdery]

These images always make me want to learn how to shoot proper astro pictures.

[jeffh]

The snapshot in time is what interests me. You technically have a picture from that galaxy as it is today from 2.5 million years in its past.

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