It certainly is not my best shot of the Andromeda Spiral Galaxy, I had very poor seeing that night, but it was just a test exposure to see how my newly installed mount & pier system is for tracking/polar alignment. Although my old mount worked great for 30 years, the old seriously weathered system needed an upgrade, so I retired my old 16 inch scope mount (weighed in over 300 lbs.)
On my new system I did not employ the auto-guider/dithering during this test, as I was limited on the number of USB ports on my older test laptop and didn’t have a hub with me to run an auto-guider and all other accessories,. I was waiting on my final Desktop PC to arrive that will eventually run this observatory wide field system or to run my 16 inch scope optics which are being remounted into a carbon fiber tube system. For the test I brought out my old “Explore Scientific” Carbon Fiber 102mm F7 APO Triplet Refractor sitting on a Software Bisque ME Robotic mount. I did sub exposures of 2 minutes, to minimize Light pollution or sky glow effects, no auto guiding just standard tracking with pro-track enabled, and 2 minute subs with my old stock Canon 6D to limit background sky glow light pollution, @3200 ISO stacked in Deep Sky Stacker, processed in Maxim-DL, Pixinsight, and Adobe CC, Captured on 09-20-2020. I’m happy with the tracking and Polar alignment and overall mount modeling. So looking forward to putting my old 16” diameter scope back into action on the new mount.
M31 The Great Andromeda Spiral Galaxy, is visible to the unaided eye from a dark location or in binocular from your backyard. It is a Sister galaxy to our Milky Way located about 2.2 million light years distance…all the star in the Image are in our galaxy, we look through our galaxy stars to see an entire island of stars The Andromeda galaxy sitting way off in the background. The two round / elliptical fuzzy patches are M32, and M110 two small elliptical galaxies that are gravitationally bound to the larger M31 The Andromeda Spiral Galaxy. M31 The Great Andromeda Spiral Galaxy will collide with the Milky Way in about 6 billion years from now…to form one larger massive galaxy.
Best Regards,
John Chumack
