Well last night I shot Andromeda as well as some other things. This is an edit of the first test image of the night so wide open and one I would bin but it was such a nice shot I figured I would give editing it a try. So here is what 1x20s @ ISO 1600 and f/2.8 with a K-3 hanging off of the SMC A * 400mm f/2.8 ED [IF] gets you if you bang on the image a bunch

Nice!

Whoa! That must be the fastest Andromeda I've seen!! Nice colors too!

I give credit to the lens, as the SMC A * 400/2.8 is something special. My ability to pull details out of images and not have them turn weird colors has improved so I am better at making the most of what I have. This was just an effort to see what I could do with a single 20s shot and to get some practice editing.

I did a stack of the shots from Saturday night and included the test image and am in the process of editing it and there appears to be a lot of goodness to be pulled out. I push it a lot so at some point things go sideways but I don't know it until I get more towards the end so have to start backtrack and start subsequent steps over, usually multiple times.

I know the feeling!

So I finally spent some time and stacked and banged on my Andromeda (M31) shots from that night. I managed to pull this out of almost 38 minutes worth of shots. I'm still not pleased with how the color came out but that took several tries. I guess I just got too use to APP sorting things out nicely for me that I forgot what I was doing when using DSS and banging away manually at things once the free trial expired.



113x20s
ISO 2500
F/3.5
K-3
SMC A* 400mm f/2.8 ED [IF]

Pretty nice for only 38 minutes! Did you do some kind of sharpening?

To bring out the details I do high pass filters (usually 4, with a radius of around 10, 25, 50, and 100). I do that on the starless layer and Pete_XL is the one who pointed me to the technique. Basically you duplicate the starless layer, apply a high pass filters (for contrast I find a value between 1.5 and 3.5 works). Once you have the highpass layer I duplicate that and set one to a blend mode of soft light and the other to overlay and adjust the opacity of those layers down. I don't use other things for sharpening and the SMC A* 400/2.8 is phenomenally sharp. I don't do any sharpening on the stars layer but I do some color enhancement, and lower their brightness.

At some point I will go and stack all of the M31 images I have gotten this year which at this point is probably getting close to 4 hours of shots. I should really be able to pull out more detail with almost 8x the exposure time.