Southern Pinwheel Galaxy M83
11-Apr-2016
The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy is a barred spiral galaxy approximately 15 million light-years away. It is one of the closest and brightest barred spiral galaxies in the sky.
Image:
- 59x 300s Luminance bin2x2 + 35 flat + 50x dark + 120x bias
- 50x 150s Red bin3x3 + 15 flat + 50x dark + 120x bias
- 50x 150s Green bin3x3 + 15 flat + 50x dark + 120x bias
- 28x 150s Blue bin3x3 + 15 flat + 50x dark + 120x bias
Total integration 10 hours 15 minutes.
Hardware:
- Celestron EdgeHD 1100
- SkyWatcher EQ8 Pro Mount
- Celestron 0.7x EdgeHD focal reducer
- QSI 683-wsg Camera @ -15°C
- Astronomik Typ 2c RGB filters
- Orion StarShoot Autoguider
- Foresight Innovations On Axis Guider
- Starlight Xpress Adaptive Optics
Location:
- Orange zone in Brisbane, Australia. (Bortle 7)
- Imaged over 5 nights.
- Average seeing + new moon.
Software:
- Planning & camera alignment with Aladin 9
- Captured with AstroArt 6
- Guiding with PHD2 + PHD_Dither
- CCDInspector: Image analysis & rejection
- CCDStack 2+: Calibrate, align, stack, combine RGB.
- Photoshop CC: shadows/highlights, high pass filter, merge L+RGB, color balance, saturation, minimum filter, reduce noise.