The family traveled to Breckenridge, CO for Thanksgiving, and I figured it was the perfect chance to test traveling with the Dwarf 3.

I used the clear, cold night to go after M31. The rental’s yard had a perfect open view, barely any wind, and crystal clear skies.

Luckily, setup took under five minutes, even in 25°F weather. Unfortunately, I promptly wasted almost 30 minutes making mistake after mistake as I tired to familiarize myself with the D3. By the time everything was dialed in (gain 60, 30s exposures), I was freezing but seeing good stacks.

I let the Dwarf 3 run for about 90 minutes before calling it a night, grabbed the scope, and checked the results inside. Honestly, the native stacking plus quick auto-enhancing in Stellar Studio blew me away.

Processing:

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.