My first proper galaxy project for the season, making use of 2 clear nights (the first for several weeks for me). Moving right overhead for us southerners and only 15 million light years away, m83 is such a joy to image - and even from my B7 location almost no gradients an hour on either side of the meridian.
I thought I'd try a slightly different approach and shoot 30sec exposures to try and minimise star bloat/oversaturation. About 11hours, and well over 1200 subs, I decided to stack them in APP in roughly 1-2hr batches otherwise this was going to take ages. The advantage of this was I was able to cherry pick the best data (APP reported FWHM of the sub-stacks ranging 1.9-3.1) and ended up keeping the best 5.5hrs. I did some comparisons trying to include the inferior data in the stack and the result was noticeably noisier and lacked detail, so as much as it hurts chucking 6hrs of hard work out it needed to happen. oh to be able to shoot in a location with consistent good seeing sigh
Anyways- here's the rundown:
681 x 30sec subs (no moon)
gain 100
C14 non edge @f7 with the Starizona reducer LF
EQ8 pro
Asi2600mc pro (no filter)
Asi290mm / celestron OAG
ASIAIR pro / APP / GIMP / LR
Binned (scaled) 80% in processing
Here's the bigger version.
Comment/critique or suggestions welcome.
Thanks for dropping by! Clear skies all!!