The Andromeda Galaxy (M31)

Last week, the family traveled to Breckenridge, Colorado, over Thanksgiving for some skiing and snow and thought it would be the perfect time to test traveling with my Dwarf 3. The Dwarf 3 is a small smart telescope which can easily fit into a backpack or carry-on luggage. It has the telescope, mount, camera, filters, and control computer in a single compact unit.

I decided to use the cold Colorado night to image M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. The rental’s yard had a wide open view of where Andromeda would travel across the night sky, the wind was calm, and the sky was crystal clear. It was an ideal night for viewing this exquisite autumn/early winter gem.

After the sun set, I ventured outside into the 25-degree weather to set up my telescope. Fortunately, setting up a smart telescope like the Dwarf 3 takes no time at all. Leveling and polar aligning the telescope took less than 5 minutes.

Unfortunately, I made so many mistakes after setting up the telescope that I lost almost 30 minutes of clear skies and started to shiver my butt off. I had forgotten to preplan and take dark frames, so I had to wait 10 minutes for them to finish. Next, I targeted M31 and started shooting light frames without focusing the Dwarf 3, losing another 20 minutes of clear skies.

Once focused, I finally got everything shooting correctly. Gain was set to 60, exposure was set for 30 seconds, and initial stacking looked good. So I went inside to warm up and let the Dwarf 3 do its job.

After 90 minutes of shooting, I decided I was too tired to stay up and I didn’t want to leave the Dwarf 3 outside. So I stopped stacking additional subframes and quickly scooped up my telescope. I was immediately impressed with the native stacking from the Dwarf 3. I was blown away with the results you can obtain right out of the box from a smart telescope after applying auto enhancements in DwarfLab’s Stellar Studio.

COf course, I wasn’t satisfied with just native stacking and auto enhancements directly from Dwarf 3. Once I returned to Austin, I fired up Siril and used Naztronomy’s smart telescope script to stack 185 suitable 30-second subframes.

However, my initial attempts failed. The resulting image was washed out after adding the Dwarf 3’s bias and flat frames, along with the darks frames I had taken in Colorado. It was almost as if the linear image was already in a pre-stretched format. Fortunately, after installing a fresh copy of the newest version of Siril (1.4.0-rc2), Nazt’s script ran flawlessly. I’m assuming it was some sort of user error.

Next, I opened the linear FITS file in PixInsight to process the image. I began by performing a dynamic crop to remove some rough edges and frame the image. Then, I used GraXpert to perform a background extraction. Before running a Spectrophotometric Color Calibration, I restored the astrometry data and used Seti Astro’s background picker to ensure I selected the best point of interest for the SPCC.

I applied BlurXTerminator and NoiseXTerminator with their default settings, then I stretched the image with a standard histogram transformation stretch. Finally, I removed the stars with StarXTerminator and set the star image aside for a moment.

I extracted a luminance channel of the starless image and opened the LRGB Combination tool. I applied the newly extracted luminance component to the L channel and disabled the R, G, B channels. Then I dragged the saturation slider to .250 under transfer functions, checked the box to apply chrominance noise reduction, and applied the edits to the starless image. This brought out the initial saturation of the blue rim and warm center of the Andromeda galaxy.

From there, I adjusted some final saturation and luminance details with the curves adjustment tool. I wanted to add a bit more structure to the spiral of the galaxy, so I created a light mask with the range selection tool and applied a very light iteration of local histogram equalization of about .15. Finally, I combined the stars and starless images in Pixel Math using the formula ~(~Starless*~Stars) and exported the image.

Here are the final results! I am extremely pleased with the results, especially considering this was only 90 minutes of integration on the target. I’m really looking forward to more clear skies to continue testing the Dwarf 3 under different conditions.

Until then, clear skies!