How do you shoot for mosaic

[Wirral man]

Hi all I use a skywatcher evostar 80ed pro with a x85 reducer  but just wondering how do I do a mosaic  image after setting apt to shoot a target which was ic1396 the elephant nebula how to I go about shooting the surrounding areas around to build a bigger picture?

[RolandKol]

Hi, EQMOD has the mosaic app, it has to be downloaded and installed separately.

I found it quite tricky to use/test... but you can try and maybe you will handle it much better than me from the first time

APT, has no special mosaic tool yet... 

Not sure how many panels you wish to combine, if only 2, simply make them around 15% overlapping (1/5) and avoid placing any detailed part of the nebula on the side

[ollypenrice]

I plan mosaics in a planetarium first and find the RA and Dec co-ordinates of the centre of each panel. It's a good idea to have a coherent naming system as well, such as 'Row1 Column1' etc for larger projects. Or just TL (top left) TR, BL (bottom left) BR etc. If you're new to mosaics I'd advise a good overlap, as much as 20%, till you get the hang of constructing the final image. Very important: edge crop all panels before trying to merge them.

Olly

[alexbb]

I do most of the things manually and I also use APT. There's a feature called framing mask. If you mark some stars towards the edges for one panel, you can easily slew (on one axis) until those stars get close to the other edge for an adjacent panel. Having the camera aligned with the axis helps.

[RichLD]

I use a combination of SGP's Framing and Mosaic wizard, EQMosaic with CDC and Olly's method. The wider your FOV, the more pronounced the camera rotation appears to be - if your not rotating your camera, make your overlap bigger to compensate.