Galaxy NGC 2903
NGC 2903 is an isolated barred spiral galaxy located in the constellation Leo. Spanning approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter, it is comparable in size to the Milky Way. The galaxy has an apparent size of 11.48′ × 5.25′ in the night sky and lies roughly 30 million light-years from Earth.
This image was made with a Nikon Z7 II and a Nikon 600mm f/6.3 lens. A total of 183 30-second exposures at ISO 6400 were made for a total of 91.5 minutes of exposure time. Star tracking was with a Fornax Lightrack II.
Individual frames were registered in DeepSkyStacker and sigma-clip averaged using program astro-sca. Sigma clipped averaging helped eliminate meteor streaks present in numerous frames. The resulting stacked sigma-clipped averaged file was then processed using program astro-color-stretch. Stretching was a two pass asinh stretch followed by a single S-curve adjustment, and color correction. The image was sharpened with a 40 iteration of Richardson–Lucy deconvolution, followed by a four-level Discrete Meyer wavelet enhancement. All of these processing operations were performed using astro-color-stretch.
Some final refinements were done using Capture One, followed by some additional noise reduction and sharpening using Topaz DeNoise AI.
