M31 in Andromeda

This is not a particularly pretty picture, especially compared to some, but like the others, its starting to show promise.  This was taken from a dark location north of Cape Girardeau, MO on a very warm and muggy early summer night.

It's clear (to me at least) from the post-processing effort that I need to both get more data (longer exposures) and learn how to do my processing with a tool other than Picture Window Pro.  I love Picture Window Pro-it's easy to use and understand and it does 48-bit color (16-bits/channel) which I can't do with the GIMP.  But the process of exporting from MaximDL with it's IEEE floating point values to integer values then manipulating the image means that I'm still ending up with a picket-fence histogram before I'm done.  More data will help, but learning to process in MaximDL would help, too.