TheSkySearchers

cheap 30$ 70mm F6 refractor doublet with a canon SL1/100D DSLR camera
I attempted to shoot triangulum galaxy. but it seemed no matter what I did. no matter how many times I aligned to stars or how perfect I leveled my tripod and mount I couldn't get more than 5 second exposures without trailing.
and I still had to throw out half of the frames I took. only got 63 out of 122 frames

this is the result. I could upload the raw stack if anyones interested in trying to get more out of it. but I think this is pretty much already pushing the image too far. its so faint.

Working with an 8-bit screen grab, you can pull "something" out of the image that sorta looks like a galaxy. However, I wouldn't expect much from a 5 minute exposure using a 70mm scope.

The stars look nice, so if you add some additional exposure time, you should end up with a good looking image.

Welcome to astrophotography! I also started with an alt-az goto mount (Nexstar 4SE), and a Canon DSLR. The Triangulum galaxy was also my first target! By the way that is a really tough target because the portions of the galaxy away from the core are pretty dim.

I expect that your biggest problem is your mount. The alt-az mounts are primarily designed for visual observations and they work well for that because they keep the target in the center of the FOV. However, their tracking can be rather "jumpy" which is a problem for imaging. With the Nexstar mount I would get about 30-50% good frames with 30 sec exposures. The bad frames had elongated stars caused by the poor tracking not the polar alignment. I expect you are having the same problem. The only real solution I found was to purchase an equatorial mount designed for astrophotography.

Longer exposures will significantly improve your final stacked image quality if you can get enough good ones.

Good luck and have fun.

Steve