I've been an occasional dabbler in astrophotography over the years, but have always struggled with doing a decent job of processing to get rid of fairly heavily light-polluted skies. As I've had the luxury of some extra time while off work for Christmas, I've been looking at some tutorials and generally practising with Photoshop. I've been working a few different ways to get the best out of a stack of 5 images I took of the Andromeda Galaxy, M31, in October 2009 with the 40D, and am now sufficiently happy to show my work here.
I realise the colours are still a little questionable, but from the orange/brown of the originals I'm very pleased to get this far. I've also been very impressed with Deep Sky Stacker and the way it can bring out faint stars from the original frames. This was just 5 lights, with no darks, flats, etc.; each shot was 40s (on a homemade driven mount) at f/4, 200mm, ISO 1600. I just cropped in a bit as the corners were a bit darker and not as good as the rest.
Very careful analysis of the full-size image alongside Wikisky shows the limiting magnitude (for stars) is about 15.3, which I'm very pleased with.
Another interesting point is the two satellite tracks in the lower part of the image. DSS has added the track from each frame, so they appear as long dashes, each dash representing 40 seconds' movement. This means they must be in pretty high orbits. I've no idea what they might be.
Here's my best image so far. I'd welcome helpful pointers for improvement.
