I like posting images as it provides evidence of what can be done and also gives something specific to talk to. I'll also look into Astro Pixel Processor. (We have a cabin on the Gunflint Trail in northeastern MN, and it is a dark-sky paradise.) I just joined the Astrophotography group, and am looking forward to checking out the posts and info there. I have yet to make a serious attempt of a deep-sky object, but am hoping to get into it next season. And here is a quick processing of M31 (Andromeda) from last year as well with less exposure but using the same software, setup, and location.Hey MossyRocks, thanks for your very informative post.
Paul so light pollution is really a killer here. All images were taken from within the core 7 county metro area of Minneapolis and St. I would like to go and take another stab at reprocessing it as I think I can do better.
Here is what I managed with that software setup, astrotracer, my K-3, and my 400mm lens with almost 9 hours of 20s exposures last Orion season.
And here is a quick processing of M31 (Andromeda) from last year as well with less exposure but using the same software, setup, and location. Also there is an eclipse coming this Friday morning so if you want to be up in the middle of the night you can have some fun trying that. There are a number of beginners there now just starting out with some bright easy targets like M45 (the Plieades), M31 (Andromeda), and M42 (the Great Orion Nebula) as they are all up now.
Ask question early and often and we will give lots of advice on how to improve with shooting and processing. We are a friendly lot, will more than likely be falling over ourselves to offer help, and I think there is atleast one mac user over there. I forgot to mention that if you want to get into astrophotography go join the astrophotography group. I also use StarNet++ which I believe runs everywhere as well as it is a great way to get a starless image so that you can split the stacked image into starless and stars layers to process them separately. That allows you to really bang on the image if you have enough data which is possible when getting many hours of exposure. I do the editing of the output mostly in GIMP and RawTherapee as both let me stay with 32bit tifs unlike photoshop that makes you go to 16bit for most things. I find it gives really good results to start from.
There is a free 30 day trial for it so you can give it a try.
It is rather slow but does a great job with alignment and correcting things and for things like correcting light pollution, sky color, star color, and gradients it does a much better job than Sequator and DSS doesn't do any of that. If one is willing to pay for software a really good option that support Windows, Mac, and Linux is Astro Pixel Processor (APP) and that is what I use. Another free option some in the astro group use is Sirril but I haven't figured out that program yet but it is open source and I believe runs on Mac.
For free if you can run Deep Sky Stacker (DSS) or Sequator (both windows only but supposedly can work under wine) they are pretty good.