M83 revisited excellent seeing

[kinetic]

Hi,

tonight was one of those rare nights.
The last night it was this steady was Dec 02 2008
according to the log!

I made the most of it, doing a tour of the favourites.
First of many processed here, M83 and a galaxy cluster in
Antlia, shown as a negative.

Bed time!

Steve

[AlexN]

Nice mate!

[peter_4059]

Nice result on the M83 Steve. It looks like you are seeing some northe-south drift with the band at the bottom of the image.

[rat156]

Hi Steve,

Impressive M83.
Picked my next target with the Antila cluster, I might go a little more widefield though.

Cheers
Stuart

[multiweb]

Wow. Very crisp M83. Impressive! :thumbsup:

[RB]

Very nice result Steve, especially on M83.

:thumbsup: :thumbsup:

[Garyh]

Excellent Steve! So sharp! I bet you got that under such steady skies!
:thumbsup:

[strongmanmike]

Yeh, excellent Steve

Lots of bits and knots in that M83, an amazing and very visually satisfying galaxy.

Mike

[kinetic]

Thanks guys,

Tonight I was hoping for a repeat, but it's not as steady.
So I spent the 1 hour cool-down doing a repro of the best
frames in the stack.
Here is 149 of the clearest from 305 frames.
First the noise goes up and the smoothness of the
dust structure suffers.
Stars are a fraction sharper but overall, not as visually
pleasing as the original, I reckon.

Well spotted Peter,
What actually caused that was a re-centreing halfway through capture
with a slight displacement south.
My only considerable tracking error is East-West due to Periodic
error of the final 2 gears in the gear-train.
This shows up as a graduated grey scale banding East and west of the
result stack (which I usually crop out due to it interfering with curves
being applied)
I left the close double in on purpose because it's a good resolution
test according to StrongManMike :)

Thanks guys for the feedback,

Steve