I’ve enjoyed a dark sky location (Bortle 2-3) for one night and has expend all the available time with just one target: M8. I’ve taken 30x180" frames with a TV85 on an EOS 40D at ISO800. Each individual frame was plaged with noise, but after applying darks, flats and biasn and stack the best tracked 26 frames with SiriL (0.99.4), I’ve “extracted” the best astrophoto I’ve taken until the date.
The only processing applied was: photometric color balance, asinh transform and histogram transform. Latter on Affinity Photo I’ve added some noise reduction (but without it, the image was very pleasant)
I know that the Canon EOS 40D is a very old camera with a lot of thermal noise, a high readout noise level and some odd banding. But if you take enough frames (my 26 is a bare minimum for this camera if you are looking for top results), you can get reasonable good results.
So, again, this post is is only a thank you to the team for bring to us this beautiful tool and to encourage other people to use they current equipment. With some care you will be glad surprised of what you can get from it.