Went out on the 14th and took a quick 470 pictures of a blank spot in the sky. Actually, they were 4 seconds a piece, so just over a 30 minute exposure. Stopped down to f/2.8 and tried out reducing to ISO 640. There is some discussion that modern (and that includes my older Nikon D5300) are ISO invariant, so there is no longer a need to crank the ISO to 1600, or even 800. I had been noticing that my images were constantly full of background noise at these ISO. I have to admit, it seems to have worked. Even zoomed in on the way much larger image that I captured, there is very little background noise to deal with.
This will be my last Andromeda Galaxy (M31) picture for a while, I think. Honestly, I am burned out on post-processing this thing. Calin, however, now knows the Andromeda Galaxy on sight, so I guess that is something. My next target will be the Triangulum Galaxy (M33), which is just below Andromeda. If I manage to find it and end up with several final images, I might eventually stitch Andromeda and the rest of this North East corner of the sky together for a big blow-out view of what we are missing out on because people need to have their backyards lit up like it is daytime.
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