Andromeda Galaxy, Mirach, Triangulum Galaxy

I saw that Flickr user Henrique J.Silva posted his version of this scene yesterday. I had a good night where I live and I wanted to try my hand at capturing the same scene with similar gear.

 

Equipment:

Celestron CGEM Mount

Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 AF-D @ f/2.8

Sony a7RIII (unmodified)

Altair 60mm Guide scope

GPCAM2 Mono Camera

 

Acquisition:

Taos, NM: my backyard - Bortle 3

43 x 151" for 1hour 5min and 13sec of exposure time.

7 dark frames

15 flats frames

15 bais frames

Guided

 

Software:

SharpCap

PHD2

DeepSkyStacker

Photoshop

 

My mount was polar aligned with SharpCap (what an amazing system for aligning). I'm not comfortable using my SCT as my lens yet. My solution is to piggyback my Sony a7RIII and adapted Nikkor 85mm f/1.4 AF-D on a ADM dovetail rail on the top of my optical tube. I used DeepSkyStacker to combine all frames and then processed the TIFF file in Photoshop. I stretched the 32 bit file and used Gradient XT on the image. I then made it a 16 bit file and stretched in level, then curves. I used the color sampler tool and levels to do my best to keep the background space black. I made a layer to overexpose the galaxies a bit and then masked off the Triangulum Galaxy to try to match it to the brighter Andromeda Galaxy. I used dodging and burning to bring out a bit more detail in the galaxies. I then using my skillset and relyed on Astronomy Tools Action Set to give the image the finishing touches.

Done