Atik383l+ 2nd Light - Cygnus NB Mosaic - WIP

[Xiga]

After doing a dry run a couple of weeks back with the vintage Tamron 135mm F2.8 lens i picked up last year, i was finally able to make a start on my Cygnus SHO mosaic project on Sunday night. Conditions were mostly pretty good. No moon about, and i only lost a couple of subs due to clouds. 

As it stands, this is currently a mosaic of 6 Ha panels, each one consisting of 3 subs of 720s each. So 36 mins per panel, or just over 3.5 hrs in total. I still have to capture a column of 3 more panels on the RHS, with the lower-right panel hopefully including the Veil Nebula. Imaging time is hard to come by for me these days, so I'm only aiming for upwards of 100 mins per panel, but might make do with just 60 mins instead. Haven't decided yet, depends on how co-operative the weather is over the next while. In any case, the overall goal is not for a deep image, but a big one, showing the large-scale nebulosity throughout the region. 

I've since picked up another vintage lens, this time a Zuiko 50mm F1.8. The plan is to use this to shoot the Oiii and Sii. It turns out that the FOV of the 50mm is almost identical to the 9 panels of Ha at 135mm. I figured, seeing as some people get by with binning their Oiii and Sii data, that i might be able to just capture them at a lower resolution instead, and save myself some hassle by only capturing one long panel of each, instead of having to do 9 shorter ones. Only time will tell if this works out or not, but here's hoping 🤞 I also plan to blend in some higher res NB data from my 80ED on a few panels (NAN, Pelican, Crescent, and Veil) for the final image. 

Minimal processing done on this, just some NR, contrast enhancement and star reduction. I really just wanted to see how it was coming along, and make sure APP was able to stitch it together ok (it did a great job as usual). In processing this, i have realised that with this setup i'm not dithering enough, as i can see what i think is walking noise in some of the raw stacks. Because the imaging scale (8.4") is lower than the guider scale (6.09") it means that even at the highest Dither setting in SGP, i'm only getting a dither of a few pixels, so next time out i'll have to up the scale factor in Phd2 to 4 or 5 to compensate for this. 

I probably need another 3 full nights to complete this, so roll on more clear skies, so i can finally put the 383l+ on to the 80ED!

Full details:

Atik 383l+

Tamron 135mm F2.8 @ F4.5

HEQ5-Pro

6 panels of Ha (2" Baader), 3 x 12 mins per panel

stacked in APP, processed in PS

Presented at full scale, so it's a big image!

Edited August 27, 2020 by Xiga

[MarkAR]

Lovely detail showing, can't wait for the finished article.

[simmo39]

Nice start! v Nice!

[Xiga]

2 hours ago, MarkAR said:

Lovely detail showing, can't wait for the finished article.

Thanks Mark. Hopefully the weather plays along and I can finish it in good time. 

1 hour ago, simmo39 said:

Nice start! v Nice!

Thanks Simmo!