NGC 2903 is a barred spiral galaxy about 30 million light-years away in the constellation Leo. It was discovered by William Herschel who cataloged it on November 16, 1784. NGC 2905 is a bright star cloud within this galaxy. [Source Wikipedia].

One of the brighter galaxies visible from the northern hemisphere, it is surprisingly missing from Charles Messier's famous catalog of celestial sights (note contradiction from above). Included in this telescopic view are intriguing details of NGC 2903's central regions -- a remarkable mix of old and young star clusters with immense dust and gas clouds. In fact, NGC 2903 exhibits an exceptional rate of star formation activity near its center, also bright in radio, infrared, ultraviolet, and x-ray bands. Just a little smaller than our own Milky Way, NGC 2903 is about 80,000 light-years across. [Source APOD].

The image was captured with the venerable Meade 12"LX200 Classic, using the Atik 383L+ mono CCD at F7.16. Astronomik's LRGB filters were used. All subs were taken at 1x1 bin, -10C, and 10 minutes each.

Image:

Lum : 55 subs (9.17hr) on Feb 10th, 13th, 18th and 25th.

Red : 12 subs (2.00 hr) on Feb 10th, 13th, and 18th.

Grn : 6 subs (1.00 hr) on Feb 18th.

Blu : 6 subs (1.00 hr) on Feb 18th.

Processing was done with PixInsight, following (for the most part) kayronjm's tutorial of Feb. 24th. Only L was used to develop the Luminance image. R, G and B were collected for the color mix.

North is up, and this is a very slight crop.

Until this image, I had blamed light pollution for the RGB gradient. However, this time I was forced to create new Flats (because of dust donuts). I found that all of the gradient disappeared with flats created at the same time as Lights.

UPDATE Mar 01, 2015:

Version "B" is a reprocessed rendition of the original material. I made an effort to diminish background noise and reduce the amount of processing. For me, always a struggle between faint detail and noise.