Horsehead Nebula and Andromeda Galaxy With DWARF II

224-frame stack of the Horsehead Nebula in Orion. Click on any image for gallery view.

157-frame stack of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy.

Steve here. Night before last I got my first astrophoto stacks of the Orion Nebula and the Pleiades with my DWARFLAB DWARF II smart telescope. Last night was another good night after some initial clouds cleared away.

I got these images of the Horsehead Nebula in Orion and M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, just off Cassiopeia (stacked 15-second exposures). I denoised and sharpened them in Topaz, then applied Auto adjustments for color and exposure, plus some minor manual adjustments, in Lightroom Classic.

The horsehead formation is pretty dim. My next big learning step is color adjustment to make things like that stand out.

I shot M31 with the Ultra High Contrast (UHC) filter, which is intended to "reduce the negative impact of artificial lights and airglow when shooting deep sky objects". I'll try another session without it to compare.

For scale and location reference, below is a shot I got of the Milky Way this past October 24th, a spectacular night, with my Canon R100, 18mm, ISO 1600, 89 seconds, mounted on my Star Adventurer. This field of view is roughly the expanse of sky we can see with our naked eyes.

It also includes zillions more stars than we can see with our naked eyes. M31 is one of them. But you might be able to see it with binoculars or a spotting scope, just a hazy dot.

Cassiopeia, on the other hand, is one of the most recognizable constellations in the northern sky, almost always visible. Except on nights like this where it can almost get lost in the incredible burst of stars we can see.

I always think of Cassiopeia as a squashed letter M. Note how the roughly equilateral triangle of the left 3 stars form an arrow pointing to M31. The bottom of the M opens up toward Polaris, the North Star, which conveniently represents almost perfect true north. It's also almost in line with M31 through the arrow point.