North American and Pelican Nebulae (2 panel mosaic)

[mackiedlm]

My first ever mosaic (only 2 panels but its a start)

Each Panel is about 3 hrs of 240s at ISO800 (half with my EOS700d the rest with the 1100D) through the Evostar 80ED with l-eNhance.

I had the devils own job getting it merged in APP but i'm reasonably happy with the end result.

C&C Very welcome

[callisto]

Lovely image

 

Mark

[rickwayne]

As well you should be!

Care to detail any of the issues you encountered making the mosaic and how you solved them? I'm also an APP user, and when the Moon quits squirting light all over the sky I'm going back to my M31 mosaic.

[mackiedlm]

10 hours ago, rickwayne said:

As well you should be!

Care to detail any of the issues you encountered making the mosaic and how you solved them? I'm also an APP user, and when the Moon quits squirting light all over the sky I'm going back to my M31 mosaic.

Thanks for that.

So, having read a post by Mabula of the APP Forum, link below, it appeared that this was not, in APP terms, a "mosaic" and I should register it using the "normal" registration mode not the mosaic mode. I did that and found a problem in the what would be the North East of USA (see the quick stretched full image below and a crop of part of the problem area) What I found really strange was that although this was in the overlap area, not all of the overlap was misaligned. The stars in what would be the mid-atlantic are largely ok.

So I went back and started again (which was a real pain because, with my creaky old desktop the first integration took literally hours!). This time I registered and integrated each panel separately, then registered/integrated the two panels using "mosaic" and it was spot on - I know where the seam should be and I simply cant see it and the star alignment is - to my eye anyway, nearly perfect.

But, another problem is that when I try to further process the integrated images in APP (from both the first and second run) when I hit the "neutralise-BG" checkbox the image just goes completely white. I have no idea whats going on and since I intended to do most of the post processing in Pixinsight it did not really matter and I did not bother trying to root-cause it. I am wondering if it could somehow be related to the fact that the first 2 hours on the pelican are from the 700D and everything else is from the 1100D - but I dont really see why that would make this problem.

Anyway, bottom line is that when done with the "mosaic" registration the final integration was seamless (pun intended!) so all's well that end well.

APP Forum re normal or mosaic registration https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/faq/what-is-a-mosaic-and-when-do-i-need-to-use-the-mosaic-registration-mode-or-why-does-registration-take-forever/#post-2705

First integration showing smeared stars in NE USA

Tight crop over NE USA coast!

I hope that helps and good luck with your M31

[geeklee]

15 minutes ago, mackiedlm said:

APP Forum re normal or mosaic registration https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/community/faq/what-is-a-mosaic-and-when-do-i-need-to-use-the-mosaic-registration-mode-or-why-does-registration-take-forever/#post-2705

Good post, thanks for sharing that link - saved for another day!

[messier 111]

amazing shot .