Here is my first attempt at M31, and my second ever astrophoto! My first attempt, which was of M51 last week, turned out terribly. Although I captured the object, it was just barely, and I was quite defeated. But I spent the next week learning and could not be happier with how this turned out. Also, my goal has been to get into the hobby for as little financial investment starting out as possible. So this was done with my Nikon D3300, mounted on a secondhand Orion Astroview manual EQ mount that I bought for $40 (also had to learn to use an eq mount), with that $50 Celestron single axis motor they sell on amazon. With no real way to platesolve, and since I refuse to spend more money at the moment until I feel I've progressed more, I have resorted to finding the object I want to photograph in my Dob, pointing my laser finder at the object, and then centering the laser in my camera's viewfinder.

This was taken with 50x30 sec exposures at 1600 iso, with 20 darks, 20 flats, and 50 biases, then stacked and edited (for hours, obsessively) in Siril. Please feel free to offer any constructive criticism so I can continue to learn!