M31 was one of two projects I captured at the 2022 Eldorado Star Party. While I was killing time during the day at the star party, I started to post-process all the data I had collected in the prior seven weeks with my brand new QHY600M. At the time, I had just become aware of a reflection in my imaging train while collecting Ha data. But as I began to stack data, I quickly discovered I had a significant reflection issue with all the projects I had worked on with the QHY600 (
North America/Pelican,
Heart,
Cygnus Loop,
California,
NGC 7822,
Orion's Belt,
Elephant Trunk, and Witch Head (upcoming)). Revision B is an overstretched and starless version of M31 to show the extent of the issue.
Honestly, I had made a major rookie mistake following an adjustment to my imaging train. With an unprecedented number of clear skies immediately following a major astronomy purchase (QHY600M), I thought I was lucky and blindly sucked down photons instead of taking the time to fully dial in the imaging train. Sure, individual subs looked great...but I was focused on the subject in the middle of the frame and not checking all the way to the edges of the full frame sensor to see if there were any hints of reflections. After 7 weeks and over 170 hours of data collected, I finally realized I had an issue that needed to be fixed...but what really hurt was thinking I might have to chuck all the data I had already collected if I wasn't able to deal with the reflections in post-processing.
Fortunately, Pixinsight has tools that can help fix issues experienced during collection. Are the reflections 100% gone from my early QHY600 images...nope...but I think of the reflection remnants as reminders of a valuable lesson learned.
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