Some Widefield Imaging of Andromeda

For Christmas I am getting a DSLR so I can make an attempt at really getting involved in astrophotography. I decided to search Ebay for some cheap prime lenses  in preparation for getting my hands on the camera and I came across an old Olympus Zuiko 50mm f/1.8 Lens which was only going to cost me about £6. At that price I couldn't resist it even if I did also have to pay another £3 for a converter so I could fit it to Canon DSLRs.

After it arrived I quickly borrowed a friend's camera and put it to work on an easy target, namely the Andromeda Galaxy (Messier 31). I basically took 10 x 8 seconds subs at ISO 1600 and then used DeepSkyStacker to stack them before undertaking a fair amount of processing work in Pixinsight & Photoshop. There was a lot of processing required as the image showed a lot of coma as I had the lens set to wide open and therefore I had to crop out a large chunk of the image and then try to remove the coma that remained. In the future I will probably need to step down the lens to get a wider view although this will reduce the amount of light I am capturing, I suppose an EQ mount of some sort will need to be procured at some point to help me extend the sub length. Anyway, despite this I am actually quite happy with the image I took which I have attached below.

My favourite aspect of the image is that you can actually make out M110 & M32 as well although they are rather small!