Hi everyone!
This is actually first light for my new William Optics Zenithstar 80mm f/6.8 ED APO scope. Well, it's far from "true APO", I would say it's a well corrected doublet, but he gives surprisingly good results. It controls CA way better than any other ED doublets I have tried before, without extensive halos around bright stars, even after 10 minutes of exposure. Still, there are stars around the field with weird colors. The scope being reduced to f5.4 using WO 0.8x reducer/flattener III, which is also doing pretty good job flattening the field, but also not perfect, so there are whacked stars around the edges. All in all, I've got this scope for 200$ in pristine condition which provides satisfying results for that buck.
So to the picture :
this is the 13 hours of total exposure HDR composition with the goal of revealing as much as possible details around the core. I have imaged it during two nights from the dark site in the desert. To get the faintest details and as much as possible Ha regions inside of the galaxy's arms I went for 10 minutes exposures @ ISO1600. For the core and star colors I did 2 minutes exposures also at ISO1600.
The Core:
As you can see in this crop of the core, I pretty much achieved what I wanted. We often see many images with large burned out core of the galaxy, which is actually concealing more of the finer details that can be revealed. I managed to resolve it to the smallest bright nucleus surrounded by very faint clouds of dust and as a whole picture it came out very well. Hope you find it very interesting as I do.
Higher and full resolution images with more details can be found on my website:
http://www.myastroscience.com/#!m31---andromeda-galaxy/c1opjThank you!
