February 6, 2015: First big mosaic with SM-II 60mm; 74 panes

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Managed to grab a whole lot of data this morning after sorting out problems with IR leakage. I ended up using the Coronado SM-II 60mm, the Lunt B1200 filter, the Daystar 63mm ERF, and a Baader 35nm H-alpha filter. No IR leakage anymore, great and much brighter views than with BF5. Data captured with FireCapture, stacked in AS!2, post-processed in ImPP (sigma = 1.8, 50 iterations of LR deconvolution + unsharp masking), and stitched with AutoStitch64. No postprocessing in Gimp in these. Meade 3x TeleXtender was used rather than 2.5x powermate, giving 1200mm rather than 1000.  This results in F/20, just under optimal for the little DMK.

With Gamma = 2.0: This brings out the proms

Some tweaks in Gimp:

Bit more unsharp masking:

Pseudo-colour added:

And inverted pseudo-colour:

[Davey-T]

Congratulations Michael, mosaics give me nightmares 

Dave

[PeterW]

Respect for stitching so many seamlessly and not ending up with any gaps!!

PEterW

[David Smith]

74 seamless panes. Impressive indeed.

[sooot]

those are great Michael, some real nice proms on the second image

[GreatAttractor]

Great result and patience!

And full-fledged GUI including ImPP's functionality will be ready soon...

[Pete Presland]

WOW 74 frames is a huge effort it has stitched together very well! Looking forward to seeing that filament hopefully today

[kev]

Interesting. I have found ysing an ir/uv block helps with my solarscope 50.

Great pics by the way!

Sent from my iPhone so excuse the typos!

[michael23]

That's  an impressive bit of processing. Super images.

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

Thanks everybody. I got 74 panes because I always want  a lot of overlap between panes. Stitching software works  MUCH better with a good degree of overlap. I overdid it a bit, and 40 panes should suffice at this scale. Looking forward to getting the ASI174 camera, however. That should allow me to cut back on the number of panes dramatically. This in turn would allow the use of a 3.75 or 4x telecentric or barlow to match image scale to the pixels optimally, and go to 10 Mpixel images

[sooot]

They say they posting this week fingers crossed