Yesterday evening was a beautiful evening to be out with a telescope. I decided to go after the Ring Nebula (M57), which was visible high in the sky.

This is an extract from one of the images I captured. The rest are being stacked as we speak.

I headed out yesterday evening to see what I could see. One of the things visible in the sky last night was the Andromeda Galaxy (M31). I put my camera on the back of the telescope and took a number of images. After aligning the images and working on them in Photoshop, I have an image where you can start to see some of the structure in the galaxy.

Andromeda galaxy (M31) (9 September 2017) © Gordon P. Dewis, 2017.

There’s specialized software for processing astrophotographs. For this image, I used one to figure out the image offset between the 8 images that went into it and then used Photoshop to manually align them. Then I converted the layers into a smart object, stacked them and applied some curves, exposure, level, and brightness/contrast adjustments.

For a first attempt, I’m happy with the results. I want to explore some of the other astrophotography software out there to see what works best for me.

There’s a lot of stuff on Twitter, some of it pretty scary and/or creepy. This tweet, however, probably jumps to the top of the holy-crap scary list:

***THIS IS AS REAL AS IT GETS***

***NOWHERE IN THE FLORIDA KEYS WILL BE SAFE***

***YOU STILL HAVE TIME TO EVACUATE***

Please RT. #Irma pic.twitter.com/VWLMEDWoUs

— NWS Key West (@NWSKeyWest) September 8, 2017