This ranks up there as one of my best shots. I'm so excited, my first decent bash at a galaxy.
Subject: NGC 253
Equipment: DSI Pro + 70-300mm lens on a barndoor mount
Focal Length: ~220 mm
Exposure Time: 1 minute
No. of Exposures: 22
Stacking done using Iris, with levels and curves in Photoshop.
I can now see that there are a lot of dust motes on the CCD chip, must blow them off with my lens puffer.
It took me 1 hour to set up for this shot. A lot of tweaking of the focus, then slowly star hopping to the target. Then a lot of fiddling trying to get the subject centred at 70 mm. Then trying to zoom in to 300 mm, losing the subject and starting again. After all that the barndoor was halfway through its travel, so I reset it and then had to centre the galaxy again. I was tired out by the time I had started!
Anyway, here it is.
[Edit]: I was a bit heavy handed with the curves on my first go and burnt out the core a bit. Here is the re-processed version (Right-hand image)
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