NGC 2903

[Alexp]

This is my first time finally posting an image here that I'm somewhat happy with 🙃. Managed to get 2h @60s exposures of NGC 2903 with my ASI533 and my SW 150PDS on an AVX. I tried this target already a week ago but I ran into weird issues with overcalibrating flats and walking noise. Thanks to help of @wimvb who pointed me into the right direction I was able to mitigate these issues now with this set of lightframes.

The only issue that I still have remaining is the background, which seems kind of patchy blue and reddish over the picture. I'd believe that may result from a combination of the light pollution from where I'm shooting at (Bortle 6/7 suburban, lights from windows all around my setup), and a somewhat sloppy way of creating masks for noise reduction (following Jon Rista's noise reduction routine in PI)? In any case, I am glad that I was able to resolve the walking noise and flats-overcorrection issues with some help so I can continue to improve at taking and at processing deepsky images.

It's certainly not as detailed as @DaveS' or @tomato's beautiful versions of this galaxy, but the galaxy itself already does a great job at looking nice 🙂. 

Cheers

[tomato]

Thanks for your comment, you have a great result there for 2 hrs of data, plenty of colour and detail in the core, and you have captured the faint irregular galaxy UGC 5086, to the lower left of NGC 2903.

Have you loaded the EZ suite of free scripts into PI? I use the EZ denoise script a lot, it creates all of the masks automatically and does a great job 99% of the time on linear data. The soft stretch script is good also.

Here is the link with the instructions on how to install the EZ processing suite, if you need them: https://remoteastrophotography.com/2020/12/easy-and-effective-noise-reduction-in-pixinsight

[Alexp]

You're welcome. Your image is honestly really nice and has a great amount of detail. I hope to be able to produce similar images sometime in my life ;). Hopefully sooner than later. 

Ah yes, I barely noticed UGC 5086. For 2h worth of lightframes I'm quite happy with the result, I plan to add more data to this stack to hopefully get some more details but I was not really expecting this for 2h. 

Thanks for the tip concerning EZ suite, I have not yet used it and I will look into it, thanks for the link.

Cheers