3 hours and 39 minutes total LRGB, more or less in 3:1:1:1 filter ratio. I had to toss some bad subs. And in fact I need to go find which one has that satellite trail that didn't reject out, and cull that sub also.
Taken over two nights this month. And in between I added some coma corrector backfocus spacing and worked on my tilt. Which just means I tried to be extra careful keeping the whole camera contraption seated to the visual back when tightening the compression ring. Anyway, I threw them all together anyway in ASTAP.
Processing is not a piece of cake, really. There are many options here -- which I tend to call imager's choice, not artistic license which I would deem to be something else entirely. The Wipe is always critical, especially for diagonal M31's taking up most of the space. AutoDev can vary greatly with ROI and IFD. And of course perhaps the biggest of all - color balance and saturation. Though color balance could head off into the art zone, if not based on a reference or something logical anyway.
This is a bit more muted rendition of others I have made with this data so far. I can just barely squeeze most of M31 into my field of view, and I am kind of thinking that it needs more space. M31 perhaps looks better with more star field around it, rather than just some giant angled galaxy right in your face.
But, I have what I have.This was also my first time trying out AltStars in SVD, coming off the discussion in another thread. Interesting, really. I need more practice at choosing samples, and modifying the mask if need be, but I think the stars came out rather good - even all my funny shaped ones from the tilt and spacing errors. I need to try more iterations as well as compare with the regular apod mask as far as the non-star fine detail goes, but so far so good for a first try.
I did have to go into Mask and add a couple brighter stars that didn't end up starfished and were left bare. Not to use as a sample (no clue how I might manually draw a starfish), but for deringing purposes.
This was a Crop edges; Bin to 35%; no-mask Wipe; AutoDev with ROI including near the core but not the dead-center core; Contrast with reduced shadow range and very reduced locality; HDR with reduced taming and highlight detail but increased shadow boost and smoothen, context 50, medium quality; SVD AltStars 16 samples, 12x iterations; Color as set by star sampling except 0.01 extra blue bias decrease, green cap, highlight repair, and saturation adjustments; Sharpen 200%, 95%/5% dark-light; and Denoise grain 6.0 pixels and defaults. No Shrink or SS.
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- M31 2-nite 3h 39m LRGB ST8 3A 1100-96.jpg (487.78 KiB) Viewed 4381 times
Just awesome what you can do in not even four hours with a mono cam (and a rather bright object like M 31)! By the way, your field of view appears very nice to me, it's not too tight. Wider fields with more surrounding stars are of course also fine but yours is just right in terms of capturing the whole thing and keeping it close at the same time. In my eyes it's better than many of the images with APS-C and 700-800 mm focal length (like my first tries) which just doesn't fit. If you want to go close you should do it like Marko recently with his stunning result 
I was sort of actually thinking mine might be a little too high wattage, and perhaps too white as well. But, I kind of had to use highlight repair. Maybe I'll let DSS register the stacks instead of ASTAP, and see if that would let me dial back the H.R.