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A couple of points.
Firstly, 80mm is not a lot of aperture for galaxies. So it will need to work hard to build up a signal.
You will also need pretty dark skies to get a decent M83 or any galaxy for that matter.
The "sand" you refer to is colour noise. It reduces quite well with Noise Ninja so it is less intrusive. Your workflow seems fine although you did not mention you did dark subtraction and flats. Flats may not be vital but your darks are with the noise you are battling.
Bottom line- 5 hours exposure time, camera as cold as it'll go, none of this 80% of power supply stuff, as long exposures as you can do - perhaps 15 minutes or 20 or even 30 suits a one shot colour camera better due to drop in QE from the Bayer matrix. You have to get the signal (the image) above the noise of the camera - read noise and dark current. Dark current is reduced by heavy cooling. My STL11 used to start to shine at about -30 to -35C. With the cold weather you should be able to get to -35C?
So colder, longer and darker skies is your formula. Your autoguiding is quite good so take a win on that eh? That can be quite a battle in itself.
Greg.
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