First go at a mosaic

[RikM]

Mosaics take some effort don't they?

This is only a baby one, 3x panes each of 2 hours in 20 min subs with an Explorer 150P, SXV-H9 and Baader 7nm Ha filter. I have got one pane done in OIII as well, and plan to finish it as an HOO.

I calibrated and stacked each pane in Maxim, then aligned them with Registar. I converted them to TIFF and brought them into Photoshop as layers with the top two set to 'lighten' mode. I ran Gradient Xterminator on each layer and then used the targeted black point dropper in levels to set the black points to 27 in each layer. I then went over the joins of the upper layers with a soft edged eraser using zigzags to hide the straight edges and processed it as normal from there on. Since this is meant to look pretty, rather than be scientifically accurate, I filled in the missing corner patches with the clone stamp tool, dropping in random bits of starfield 

I'm quite looking forward to getting this one completed in colour

Another first, I didn't use any noise reduction