M83 Southern Pinwheel Galaxy under a near full moon

[Startrek (Martin)]

Took on M83 last night with a 90% Waxing moon lighting up the sky and my backyard
Seeing wasn’t too bad towards the south east over near the southern cross but the rest of night sky was fairly washed out
8” f5 Bintel newt on an EQ6-R Mount
Orion 60mm guide scope with a ZWOASI120MM S guide camera
Canon 600D stock with a home made cooling fan ( No Filters )
ISO 800
45 x 3 minute dithered guided subs
25 x darks
PHD2 guiding around 1.00 arc sec error
Medium dither every second sub
Tracking and Goto EQMOD , StellariumScope and Stellarium
Frame , focus and capture BYEOS
Stacked in DSS
Processed in Startools V1.4
Started around 10pm and finished up at 2.30 am ( moon was still descending at 25 degrees in the west )

Thanks for looking, comments most welcome

[ChrisV (Chris)]

Nice Martin. Was pretty bright moonlight last night!

[etill (Elliot)]

Nice processing on that. I got a bunch more of M83 a while back to see if there was much difference with the modded camera, just haven't had a chance to process it yet.

[Startrek (Martin)]

Thanks Chris
Some people say why bother imaging such a dim object under a huge moon glare without filters
Answer - because it’s a challenge and I have a lot of confidence in my processing software Startools

Thanks Elliot
I didn’t think you needed a modded camera to shoot galaxies, isn’t it more about getting your focus right , good seeing conditions, plenty of long subs plus enough aperture and sampling to expose the spiral arms and core
My 9 year old stock 600D does a fairly good job with galaxies as long as conditions are good.The moon glare does play havoc with your stars and also the finer detail in the galaxy.Processing out all the heavy gradient and noise does affect your image quality

[etill (Elliot)]

I don't know if the modifications make a difference or not. I'll soon find out..

Unfortunately I know more about software and data than photography and cameras. Stacking, noise reduction, deconvolution, etc all makes sense, focal lengths, apertures, focusing not so much.

I have a feeling that the filter I used probably makes more difference than anything else, it'll be interesting to see if its better or worse than last time.