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The image above is a 1/4 resolution view, 1002 x 668 pixels ~ 0.6 MB.

Click here for a 1/2 resolution view, 2004 x 1336 pixels ~ 2.0 MB.

Click here for a full resolution view, 4008 x 2672 pixels ~ 9 MB.

 

Image Information:

Object(s)	M 31, M 32 and M110: The Andromeda Galaxy
Date(s)	October 20, 2006
Optics	Takahashi BRC-250 10 inch f/5 Ritchey-Chrétien astrograph with a 1,268 mm focal length
Mount	Losmandy G-11 with Gemini Level 3 V 1.1
Camera	SBIG STL-11000M on loan from CSU Fresno Physics Department (thanks to Fred Ringwald)
Guiding	Internal selfguiding with dithering
Field Scale	1.45 arc seconds / pixel
FOV	96 x 67 arc minutes
Camera Cooling	-15 C Regulated Thermoelectric
Filter(s)	Astrodon True Balance LRGB I-series 50mm
Location	Shaver Lake - Wildflower:  N 37O 03' 22", W 119O 19' 30" at 5,470 feet
Exposure(s)	L = 6 x 600 seconds, RGB = 3 x 600 seconds each (2.5 hours total)
Binning	All channels at 1x1
Camera control	MaxIm DL 4 V 4.53
Processing software	MaxIm DL 4 V 4.53, Photoshop CS2 V 9.0
Image notes	Processed images were fully calibrated, aligned, sigma clipped and median combined and unsharp-masked.

 

CCDWare's CCDInspector has been used to measure the FWHM values of several thousand stars in the field and fits a 3-D polynomial surface to them showing field curvature and or collimation accuracy as a function of stellar profiles.  It looks like I need to fine tune the collimation.  These surface plots were generated from the Luminance channel 6x600 second sigma clipped master image.  If the collimation was better, I would expect the plot to look more like this.