Heart Nebula is big! Tops please for aligning images together

[Fordos Moon]

Hi all,

For fun I thought I would try and image the heart nebula.

I took 20 x 600 second subs, darks and flats with my Canon 1100D on the ED80.

I guess I didn't really think about field of view, and in all honesty should have realised something was amiss when I saw the first capture. But I saw some red areas, presumed I had it (as up til now everything I have imaged has fit comfortably) and I continued.

This resulted in the following result from Deep Sky Stacker..

And with a little processing in Photoshop this:

Obviously I would like to have a complete picture of the nebula so I plan to go and image the other half.

My questions are:

1. Do I simply line up my scope to the area I am missing (with some overlap) and do exactly the same number of subs/darks/flats 

2. Do I merge the images that are the result of the DSS stacking before any adjustment?

3. Do I use particular software to align the images? ie Registar I hear is good.

Thank you in advance of any advice.

Bob

[swag72]

I do my mosaics in the following way.

Line up with your original pane.

Move the image upwards in the frame until you have a nice overlap. I'd recommend about a 20% overlap.

Download MSICE and put your unstretched 2 stacked images into it. It will match them up and it's free

[RikM]

I've used MS ICE for lunar mosaics and it worked well. I didn't know it would work for DSO images as well. I might give that a go

[Fordos Moon]

I do my mosaics in the following way.

Line up with your original pane.

Move the image upwards in the frame until you have a nice overlap. I'd recommend about a 20% overlap.

Download MSICE and put your unstretched 2 stacked images into it. It will match them up and it's free

Many thanks!