35Mp cygnus area mosaic

[Avdhoeven]

Yesterday I wanted to do a last test of my new Canon 100mm lens with my CCD to see if I could do some mosaicing. When I started I decided to go for really large scale. So I decided to try to do it with short exposures to see what I could get. I ended up using TheSky6 for calculating my individual image positions in its mosaic tool. Good thing about that is that you give a center and an overlap and the program automatically calculates the center positions of all images. All you have to do then is to slew from one center to the next for the next image.

In this way I started up gathering 3x300s exposures per tile using the following setup:

Lens: Canon 100m F2.0 @ 2.8

Camera: SXV-H9

Filter: Custom Scientific 4,5nm h-alpha

Mount: NEQ-6 without seperate guiding, just internal pole alignment

For focusing I used a self made bahtinov mask and the bahtinov grabber software, which made focusing a real ease...

I ended up with a mosaic consisting of 16 tiles until now. Then it started to get light and I had to quit. So in total 4 hours only were used in one of the most light polluted areas of the Netherlands, only 15 km under Rotterdam. I was astonished by the result, to say the least...

Here is the image in small scale, full scale can be found here (carefull, it's 15mb): full size

And an annotated version here: full size

[nmoushon]

HOLY Rubbish! Thats a giant mosiac. Beatuful. Are you going to add color or keep it mono? Would love to see it finished!

[SplintUK]

Great stuff. Giving me some ideas for when I get outside to play ;-)

[SJJ]

Bet you're pleased with that result. Fantastic, loads of detail.

[farunj]

Wow!! That's a fantastic mosaic!!

[Folkert]

Nice stuff. Makes me want to invest in some narrow band filters!