I finally managed to get a good spell of clear weather in New Mexico. M31 is such a popular target for imagers and we see so many images of it, but it really does suit this scope and camera combination. I also wanted to practice my processing skills in Pixinsight, especially as colour is not something I have done much of.

This is an assembled LRGB image. The luminance consists of 11 x 300 sec subs but the colour was a mish-mash of exposures consisting of 5 x 300 sec in the Blue, 9 x 180 sec in the Green and 7 x 300 sec in the Red. The colour subs were binned 2×2.

Overall I’m happy with this. The core shows nice graduation and the outer star forming regions show good detail. As for the colour – I haven’t tweaked this too much. I used Pixinsights star colour calibration tool so didn’t want to stray from what this gave me.