Atacama astrophotography dataset: The faint stellar streams of M83

M83: The surprising Southern Pinwheel galaxy

With a total integration time of about 16.5 hours, this raw stacked image will reveal both the young star forming regions in the spiral arms of the galaxy and its less-knows stellar streams spanning several arcminutes further from the main disk, down to surface magnitude of 28 arcsec^-2 (in V band).

Inside this dataset pack you will find a small but useful set of files built for astrophotographers who want to test the data, compare their processing, and explore the potential of astrophotography from one of the darkest skies on Earth.

Included in this dataset:

• 1 stacked image file in FITS and XISF format at maximum resolution (6248X4176 pixels) taken with a 200 mm f/5 Newtonian telescope, ASI 2600MC camera operating at -10°C from Bortle 1 sky. Integration time of 100X600 seconds, with average seeing of 1.2 arcseconds, humidity around 40%, and mean autoguiding error (RMS) of 0.45 arcseconds. Each single frame has been calibrated with master dark frames, master sky flat fields and master bias frame (for flat calibration)
• 1 finished reference image processed following my workflow with PixInsight and Photoshop
• 1 short data sheet with acquisition notes
• 1 quick-start processing note

Usage note

This dataset is provided for personal learning and processing practice only. Do not share the raw image. You may share your processed version for non-commercial purpose provided that you credit the owner of the data (Daniele Gasparri).