M83

[JoeyJoJoJr]

Interested in thoughts on processing work flow, I'm not one to want to spend a lot of time on it and more interested acquisition and keeping things looking 'natural' than over processing and trying to expose fainter details.

I went against all advice and bought a Celestron Nexstar 8se for dual AP/visual purposes. I've actually had a great experience with it, I built my own wedge and was able to get 60 second subs with OAG. I've finally upgraded to an AZEQ6 which I've tested up to 5 minute subs with no loss of frames due to tracking/guiding issues.

M83
Imaging telescopes or lenses: Celestron C8
Imaging cameras:ZWO Asi533MC Pro
Frames: 12x120"OPTOLONG L-PRO
Bortle 5
Live stack + simple manual stretch and colour balance
The spike artifacts on some stars is because I accidentally set my home made dew ring temp too high

305287

[AstroViking]

Lovely detail in the arms of the galaxy, and good colours too. Well done.

Cheers,
V

[oska]

Nice one Adrian. The quickest basic workflow I know of revolves around ezSoftStretch in PixInsight.
If you're not going to use the available "tools" (kudos!) you will need to get much much more data to mitigate the noise. Depending on target brightness of course, at F10 the bare minimum is about 12 hours and even then there can be a need for background extraction, for example. 20+ hours is a more realistic minimum IMHO.