M83 The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy.

[A.S.I.G.N_Baz]

G'day!

About a month ago, I spotted this little beauty and thought I would have a crack at it. I got 34 minutes at ISO 1600 and was faily impressed.

Last night the mercury plummeted to minus 2 degrees celcius so I donned the extra four layers of clobber and headed back out into the dome.

I had left the camera on the scope in the same orientation as a month ago so it would all stack neatly and proceeded to capture another hour of exposure at ISO 800.

Using Deep Sky Stacker, I stacked both sessions together for a total of 1hour 34 minutes. Here is the comparitive result.

All images taken with an unmodified Canon 400D on a Celestron Nexstar 11 GPS, focal reduced to F6.3. Guided manually via piggybacked Skywatcher ED 80 and Modified ToUcam.

Thanks for looking!

Baz.

[Daniel]

Wow, really nice, encouraging to see it done on an unmodified DSLR, only dissapointment is that it'll always be way too low in the sky for me to image unless i can find a very flat site to image from, maybe something for the next deep sky camp, although im not even sure that would be unobstructed enough for this one!

[RobertM]

Hey Baz,

A Very nice image and that's pretty impressive for manual guiding.  How the hell did you manage to concentrate on one star for so long ?  I'd imagine you woke the following morning with a star and crosshair image imbedded in your retina

Maybe you could think about becoming our 'Orpington South' Observatory ?  We'd be the only UK Society with global coverage !

It's great to see new objects that we'd not otherwise get a chance for so keep em coming.

Robert

[JohnP]

Yep - very nice - quite a weird shaped spiral... I'm impressed that your kit didn't shift at all in over a month....

Cheers,  John

[doug]

     A brilliant image, Baz.   I would give anything to be able to see those southern skies; the only way I can is people such as yourself showing us these images.  It`s certainly got the wow factor and please lets have some more.  Did you say minus two Celsius?  Bloody nora, mate, that`s real chilly !!!  I don`t yet do imaging, only observing, and I have the greatest respect for those who do.  Carry on the good work.