After stacking the data and seeing the Master Lights, I immediately knew that the real challenge in processing would simply be not ruining what came straight from the camera. The LRGB frames were captured on specially "selected" nights with absurdly good seeing, and the mount was tracking at 0.2" - 0.5". As a result, individual frames have an FWHM of around ~1.7". All of this effort was because M33 has a unique "graininess" - I can't find a better word for it.

Unfortunately, in most images, this graininess is lost due to the use of NoiseXTerminator or other noise reduction methods, combined with poor seeing.

I almost never publish images without some level of "resize" -but in this case, there was no other option; it just wouldn't make sense. Only when viewing the image at 100% resolution does this incredible texture and detail become visible, along with… a bit of noise, unfortunately. NoiseXTerminator was applied very lightly here, but it simply doesn’t handle this galaxy well.

I’m very happy with this project. For me, this is one of the best images I’ve taken and one of the highest-quality datasets I’ve managed to capture from Spain. Though, knowing myself, I’ll probably revisit the processing at some point to see if I can bring out even more or present it differently.

I encourage you to click and view it at full resolution. It still amazes me that with such amateur equipment, we can take images where nebulae in other galaxies are visible. Space is incredible!

Raw Master Lights Frames are available to download here:
https://astrophotomarket.com/en/image-details/55/m33
You can download, process, combine with your own data and publish the image as your own astrophoto on Astrobin, Facebook and so on.