Hi all Sorry in advance for the wall of text.
I started this hobby back in Feb of this year, but sadly Arizona's monsoons and health issues sidelined me for the last 3 months or so. It feels like I am having to relearn everything. This is my fist attempt at M31.

130x120s Gain 100 all captured using the live preview @ 2 hours 3 times last night. I did Autofocus between each session and tracking bounced between .4 & .7. Dithered every 3rd frame.


Workflow... as best as I can remember

WBPP With "Galaxy" preset & 2x Drizzle
DBE with manual selection about 80 points
SPCC with Filter preset selected
BXT > SXT
Manual histo stretch to get close then Arcstretch
bumped up the saturation on the red and blues by a bit
No frills manual histo stretch on the stars
pixel math to combine
NXT
SCNR (green)
Small histogram adjustment at the end to bump up the contrast a bit.
Small dynamic crop
Resampled 40% to get the resolution close to 4k

It looks like we have very good skies in the forecast for the next 4 days, so I want to try to grab another 16 hours of data.

A few questions to go along with good, the bad, and the ugly feedback I am requesting:

Is 20 hours or data too much/little? where do I hit diminishing returns?
I noticed there is a a semi recent update to PI, but I have had the nerve to attempt the upgrade yet. Is there anything new in the update that makes it a must have with my setup? I saw mention of new "FAST" stuff, but best I can tell that is only for planetary stuff.

I tried to be as detailed as possible, but if I missed something critical that is needed to provide help, please let me know.

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