This august I was able to go with our astronomical group to our usual appointment at Colle dell'Agnello in Italy, very close to France border.

The place is very dark, but the weather can often be a problem. Sometimes too windy, clouds covering the sky pretty quickly, sometimes even surrounding us (massive humidity, lens and mirrors getting wet).

During one of these nights I tried to get NGC7000, only to get inside a cloud right 5 minutes after finishing setting up everything and starting exposures.

It lasted a while, and I didn't have much time left, so I decided to get a quick shot at an old classic, M31.

Here's the result:

On this night I wanted to shoot another subject, but after some minor equipment issues, and more importantly after being completely surrounded by clouds for almost an hour, it was alread too late, and I had very little time to get a proper shot at it.

So I decided to go for the evergreen M31, a very easy subject, showing so much data even with a relatively short total exposure time.

This is the result of 1 hour and 12 minutes of exposures (originally 1:45, some frames were discarded for their poor quality).

Roughly 2 hours of exposure (discarding a good portion of frames, so I stacked slightly more than 1 hour).

Setup:

ASI1600mm (non cool) TS Photoline 60mm F/5.5 (with reducer, fl=260mm) Star Adventurer Processed using Pixinsight I'm not 100% happy about both the shooting and the processing, stars don't look very good when zooming in, but I quite like the fact that the core is not saturated, and some nice details can be spotted too.

Instead, the best result of this holiday was probably the timelapse of our days (and nights) at the shelter: