My Tutorial for Producing Deep Space Mosaics with EQMosaic

[Quatermass]

Looking at your frames Gina I think your camera needs to be the other way. Your getting what I was getting, big overlaps. I'm not sure why this is but when I got my camera the right way round I found it easier to move the frame over manually using a star in the bottom right corner as my marker. Back yard eos has that mask function where you can just overlay a previous sub which works well. If you get the overlap issue sorted out please tell me how you do it as its not working very well for me hence doing it manually. :-)

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[Gib007]

Looks like this mosaic can lead to a stunning image there!

Indeed PI can do a better job of stitching up the segments. There's a tool specifically designed for seamless stitching of mosaic segments, which is described and used in my tutorial. 

[Quatermass]

I really like Microsoft ice it does a great job if your sub's are clean then photo shops autoblend function takes care of the rest. Sure beats doing what I was doing before :-)

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[Gina]

Just tried EQMosaic with CdC and gone to the adjacent block (F5) and the rectangle representing the FOV moved about twice what I should have done.  Then when I went back to F6 the rectangle wasn't back where it started.  "Confused?  You will be!"

Now the cloud's come over my target   Grrrrr.

[Gina]

Cloud's gone - Melotte 15 in full view.  Tested EQMosaic and it seems to be working correctly now according to CdC.  Real imaging will tell   Currently on F6 5X5m Ha binned 2x2.  Test imaging binned 8x8 and 15s shows bad gradient.

Single sub stretched first as taken second with GradientXterminator and darkened.

 

[Gina]

The overlap seems fine now - just got to sort out the gradients.

[Nathan_Pembs]

That's looking really good Gina I found it works better with the camera set up in RA, the panels seem to fit together better.

[Quatermass]

Looks cool Gina better wait for Mr blobby to go away though or those gradients will be a nightmare.

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[Gina]

Thanks folks

[Gina]

Drat - just typed a whole load of text and lost it before I posted   Caught the back button on the trackball.  I get fed up with my slight lysdexia and now fidgety fingers!  Sorry for the rant - feel a bit better now

[Quatermass]

Rant away Gina :-)

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[Gina]

Thank you Mark   I know I should be grateful for my abilities and that there are others much wosre off than me.  My OH is dyslectic (? spelling) and he was classed as a dunce at school and even his sister doesn't believe how inteligent he is - and clever in very practical ways.

[Gina]

OK let's see if I can rememember what I typed and lost

Lats night was mostly clear until around 11pm when the mist came in but earlier there were odd bits of thin cloud the spoilt some of my data sets (panes).  After a couple at 5x5m Ha binned 2x2 I reduced it to 4 subs each to save time and get as many panes in the available time as possible.  This was just a test of EQMosaic and getting my head round it and the subsequent processing.

(Posting this in sections so as not to lose it )

The overlap seems fine now so I think I'm OK with EQMosaic.  I'm using it with CdC which does the job but I can see that Stellarium would be better with it's detailled DSO pictures.  With CdC I'm also referring to a large detailled image of the Heart to see what I can expect to see in each frame.

(Post a bit - edit it to add more...... )

I've collected about 6 panes so far from last night.  The moon was causing bad gradients and I had to use Ps to stretch and remove these before trying to join them together.  I know it's recommended to combine panes in linear mode before applying non-linear stretching but the moon ptu paid to that idea.

I've been trying to combine using RegiStar which is fine for the panes that overlap the central reference image but it won't include  panes outside of that even though they overlap inner panes.  So I'll be trying other software.

[Quatermass]

I tried Stellarium with eqmod Gina and actually prefer cdc it loads faster and is less of a memory hog. If you follow this great tutorial on it you can load up pictures of the deep sky objects as well.

http://uncle-rods.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/sky-charting.html

This is the section from the tutorial on getting pictures, but do read the whole tutorial I found it very helpful.

Do you like pictures? I do. They can be a huge help identifying the dimmest of the dim. Cartes du Ciel can download deep sky object images from the Digitized Sky Survey, but it’s handy to have onboard pix for those times you ain’t got no Internet. The Pictures catalog contains images for nearly 10,000 objects, which will be placed on your charts in lieu of symbols when you enable them by clicking the “show pictures” button on the lower icon bar. This is about 30 megabytes of data, but it is well worth your time and drive space.

Getting the pictures going is slightly trickier than enabling catalogs, but not tough. When you’ve installed them, you must first go to the setup menu, click on “pictures,” and select the “objects” tab. When you are there, click the “scan directory” button (the default directory above that should be correct). When it’s done, close the setup window, click the “Show pictures” button, and, counter-intuitively, unclick (turn off) the “show deep sky objects” button two buttons to its left. If you do not do that, the pictures will be hidden by DSO symbols if you have “fill” turned on in the “deep sky colour tab” in the display menu. If you’d like to see both pictures and symbols/outlines of DSOs, go to the display/deep sky colour window and uncheck “fill” after each object type. 

[Gina]

Thanks Mark looks interesting and useful

[Gina]

I have applied for and got a PI trial licence.  Downloading it now

[Quatermass]

What's PI stand for Gina 

[Gina]

Tried using Canon's PhotoStitch - not good   In fact it doesn't work...  And you can't see any detail at all in a mono version - as it should be

[Quatermass]

Forget that Gina download Microsoft's ICE its way cool and you can save your files as Photoshop files. Once you have run them through ice put them in Photoshop and use Auto-blend it does a great job. That will be under Edit-Auto blend layers

This is what it looks like, you just drag and drop your images on to it and then export them to your desktop as psd file when its done.

heres the link

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/

[Gina]

PI installed, all codes entered, updates downloaded and installed... so all ready to go   Now comes the hard part - learning to use it

[Gina]

Forget that Gina download Microsoft's ICE its way cool and you can save your files as Photoshop files. Once you have run them through ice put them in Photoshop and use Auto-blend it does a great job. That will be under Edit-Auto blend layers

This is what it looks like, you just drag and drop your images on to it and then export them to your desktop as psd file when its done.

ice.JPG

heres the link

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ice/

Downloaded, installed and ran ICE then dragged and dropped my images into it.  Got this error message

[Gina]

Tried it with the previous night's image stacks where I overlapped them by hand and that's worked.

[Russe]

Just in case:

Here's a link to starizona's guide to mosaics

http://starizona.com/acb/ccd/software/ps_mosaic.aspx

[Gina]

Just in case:

Here's a link to starizona's guide to mosaics

http://starizona.com/acb/ccd/software/ps_mosaic.aspx

Thank you

[Gina]

Here's last night's lot manually placed in Ps as per the above tutorial.  The images were rather poorer than I thought.  I know I was fighting the cloud...

This can't be right - must check again that I have the panes in the right places.  And I think at least one is the wrong way round