M83, The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy

Is described here in Wikipedia.

It is a barred spiral galaxy about 15 million light years away and a member of the group of galaxies which also contains Centaurus A. This galaxy exhibits a lot of dark clumpy dust lanes and a nice bar.

I imaged it with the 16" Meade and SBIG ST-2000XCM one shot colour CCD camera. 9 frames of 5 minutes exposure were captured using CCDOPS software, 7 frames were used in the stack. CCDOPS was also used to calibrate the light frames and to stack them into a final image which I then further processed in Photoshop CS3.