M31 - Andromeda Galaxy

Dave/Jed,

Sensational image! The finely detailed structure you managed to capture of the dust lanes is particularily impressive - I don't recall seeing them so clearly revealed in "professional" images in a long while! What I need now is a "we are not worthy" emoticon (e.g. :worthy:)...

Paul

WOW :shock: Superb photo guys!

Wow lots of detail there.

I would have thought that your darks would gotten rid of the red area. BTW on the Canon 20D this appears in the bottom right as an O shape that fades outwards. It also looks like there is some vignetting and maybe internal reflections from the tube, perhaps reduce the focal length and crop the center to reduce this.

Great image, keep it up!

Spectacular shot! Dust lanes and all!

My god, that is a mighty photo! I recently bought a few books purely dedicated to astrophotography and that is worthy of being in any of them. Other people have said it and I also would love to see a calender of the photo's from this site or Irish clubs. :shock:

Thanks for all the comments guys. Theres one thing that that low res jpg version doesnt show which blew me away when I discovered it. While comparing the full res tiff version with a photographic atlas of M31 you can clearly see some globular clusters, open clusters etc *INSIDE* M31. I'll do up some examples and post them later. I must say I nearly fell off my chair when I realised they were there!

The red glow thing is a problem. Jed and myself have spent quite a bit of time discussing the cause. We are gonna do some tests tonight to get to the bottom of it. I suspect it may be a vignetting effect caused by me using a 1.25inch adaptor. I think with a 2inch adaptor in place that will go away.

No doubt we will revist M31 again. You may remember again that monday night last was a very moist night, clear but very foggy. What I wanna see is what kind of image we could get from a dark site (the image above was taken from light polluted Raheny) on a dryish night. Hopefully we will have resolved the red glow issue too!

Thanks again for the kind comments