Long exposure M31 with S50 and Dwarf 3

starnet59

For those interested in comparisons between the S50 and the Dwarf 3, here are two images taken last night of Andromeda, M31. The two telescopes ran side by side for 7 hours, although the effective stacked time was 3.5 hours for the S50 and only 1.5 hours for the Dwarf 3 (I do not know why as I slept through the whole process). The S50 image is a 2x frame, 2160x3840 pixels, the Dwarf 3 is 3776x3848 pixels, a 1.8x by 1.0x mosaic, because the Dwarf supports independent frame scale factors and you can make square images if you want. The S50 frame was rotated about 30 degrees relative to the RA/Dec coordinates for a better fit, the Dwarf 3 doesn't have a rotate frame function.

Both images are post-processed only with their own tools, AI Denoise respectively Mega Stack and Stellar Studio, no other software tool or astro image processing program was used. Both produced uncompressed FITs and/or PNG files, what you see here are slightly compressed JPEG file to get under the 2MB limit so I can upload them here.

I am not saying one is better or worse than the other, they seem pretty similar to me. Which one do you like more?

wvreeven

starnet59 I am not saying one is better or worse than the other, they seem pretty similar to me. Which one do you like more?

Impossible to say because of a) the difference in exposure time and b) comparing post-processed images. It would require unprocessed stacks of the same amount of images with the same exposure time to be able to do a useful comparison.

Having said that, the bottom image (which by the look at the filename turns out to be of the SeeStar) shows the outer parts of M 31 better though I like the colours of the Dwarf image better.

starnet59

wvreeven Yes, the bottom one is the S50 and the top square one is the Dwarf 3, which is actually larger (same height but wider) then the S50 one because of the way this site scales images.