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Sigvald1 OP t1_ixzey3n wrote

ANDROMEDA GALAXY

My first ever tracked image!! 🤯 Previously I have only ever done untracked

It is 2.5 million light years away and contains about a trillion stars, each and every star has a high probability of planets orbiting around them. There has to be life out there…

It’s just so mindblowing to me, that I am able to photograph a whole different galaxy, a different world, 2.5 million years in the past. All this with a normal camera and tracker.

So last weekend I went to my cabin near steinkjer (Norway) in bortle 3 (low light pollution). It was -14 outside and prime conditions for seeing/photographing. The total integration time for this Image is 30 minutes.

I stacked all the pictures in deepskystacker together with the calibration frames. After i imported the file i got out of DSS into Photoshop. There i used levels to stretch out the image and curves to make galaxy be more visible. Then i used a script called starnet++ to remove the stars of the image, this is because with the stars on a seperate layer I can work on the galaxy without distorting stars. This is also how I reduce the stars to make the galaxy pop out more.

If you are fascinated by space as much i am, please check out My Instagram: sigurd_photo instagram

INFO: Lights: 43x40s, Darks: 15, Flats: 15, Biases: 20, Camera: fujifilm xt30 (APS-C), Lens: 55-200mm F4.6, ISO: 1250, Bortle: 3, Tracker: star adventurer gtI

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hidden-in-plainsight t1_iy22sq0 wrote

What's mind-blowing to me, is how small we are and how big we make our problems, as a species.

Life is too short to have to worry about small things. But, here we are, making existence terrible for each other, instead of lifting people up.

Kudos OP for sharing this humbling image. I hope it helps to open some people's eyes.

Edit: goes without saying this is a beautiful picture but im writing this just in case.

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Mjolnir12 t1_ixzn13e wrote

What tracking mount did you use? Some sort of equatorial?

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