Sadr area - Propellor, Crescent, Tulip

[don4l]

This is a 6 pane mosaic with 60 min per pane.  It has been combined by hand in the Gimp.

I know that the joins are visible,  but I sort of enjoy seeing if I can put one of these together.

In the past, I've struggled with mosaics because I cannot really get my head around the rotation issues involved - and once I start rotating panes in the Gimp, the stars become visibly different from one pane to the next.  During this image I tried a completely new (to me anyway) method of aligning frames.  Each image was platesolved and put into Cartes du Ciel as a background image.  For the next frame I platesolved, and used CCDCiel's "Send frame to Planetarium" option.  This immediately showed if the camera need rotating or re-centering.  This sounds much more complicated than it is in practice.  Anyway, the result is that none of the panels needed to be rotated.  They aren't perfect, but they are close.

 

FSQ106ED at F3.6

G2-16200 MKII camera,  EQ6

EQ6

Acquired with CCDCiel, Calibrated and stacked in CCDStack, patched together in the Gimp.

Comments, suggestions and advice very welcome.