M31, another hour

New camera or not, there is a hard limit on what can be captured in a bright sky. This time of year, M31 is still to the northeast in the sky, and that region is full of city lights here. This shot adds about an hour to the previous one-note that noise is greatly reduced, but nothing fainter is showing up. To really capture this, I'll need to wait another month or two for it to be in a darker region of my local sky. This is still only the central region; the disk extends well past the cluster at the bottom of the picture.

As it is, just to differentiate just part of the galactic disk from the background sky, I had to stretch this image to the point that any meaningful color was destroyed. Here is what it looked like after stacking, but before stretching the dynamic range-the sky itself is just as bright as the galaxy. Once again, my thanks go out to Target and Home Depot, for choosing lights that shine up as well as down, and lighting up half of the valley at 3 in the morning. Remember them when your utility company tells you to use less electricity. (And let's not forget chihuahua lovers, who still believe that I can train coyotes to eat their stupid pets, and therefore aim floodlights at my house to ward them off, like some sort of electric garlic. As I have said, if I could train coyotes, they wouldn't have any chihuahuas left at all.)

This was, by the way, my first shooting session where the camera was controlled remotely from my computer, while I sat indoors getting a head start on the processing. Since I often sit outside minding the scope  in order to avoid hearing the stuff my family likes to watch on TV, I'm not sure I will use that feature a lot...