Summer Mosaic Project - Veil Nebula in Narrowband

[OzDave]

After a whole month of imaging totalling 177 hours (75 Ha, 50 OIII, 52 SII) I have managed to complete a 6 panel mosaic of the entire Veil Nebula region within Cygnus. This was shot with my Equinox 80 and the Skywatcher "Flattener". It hasn't done a brilliant job of making things flat in the corners, but I guess that is what you get from relatively cheap equipment. I used Baader filters with my QSI 683wsg camera and auto-guided via the built-in OAG. All subs were 20 minutes.

The images were fully processed in PixInsight using a workflow tutorial documented by "Light Vortex" on his(?) astronomy web site. I am not especially happy with the stars in the resulting image and I think I need to learn how to do better with those. However, part of the problem is not having perfectly sharp image captures due to the "par focal" filters not really being par focal. I plan to get a motorized focuser to make this better. Generally speaking on a given night, images from one filter would be sharp and the other filters would be not quite.

Anyway, I find that "binning" hides a multitude of sins and so the image I'm posting here is resampled at 40% of original size and slightly cropped to facilitate forum posting. It doesn't look too bad at this scale. I hope you like it.

[Epicycle]

It does look awesome Dave even with the binning! Impressive integration time. Dealing with the stars in the Veil is a problem, it has too many! Btw, thanks for eqmac, it's a blessing to be able to do imagin without windows!

cheers

E.

[OzDave]

Thanks! On the integration time, it's a total of 177 hours (cumulative), but that was to capture 6 panels. So if you average that out over the 6 panels, it comes out to 29.5 hours integration time for the whole mosaic. Unfortunately not every panel has the same amount of integration time, but the ones with more detail generally have the most, so I guess that is ok.

And yes, it was captured using EQMac entirely on a Mac Mini. No Windows here!