Cygnus Mosaic

[Phillyo]

Good morning all.

I (stupidly) decided I wanted to do a large mosaic of the cygnus region this year, however having never done one before I jumped straight in gathering hours and hours of data for one area before really knowing what to do. So, last night I decided to go back to square one and take a simple 2x2 panel mosaic of the area around NGC6888.

This is only 1 hour of data per panel but I just wanted to see what it would be like, how to do it, merge it, edit it all etc. However, other than it being a bit (very) noisy, I'm quite happy with the result.

I've added a second image with the moon at the bottom right to give a sense of scale to the image too. 

Hopefully i'm going to add more data to this as/when the weather allows.

Thanks for looking and any advice or critiques are always welcome.

Phil.

Edited August 21, 2022 by Phillyo

[peter shah]

Wow!....beautifully done Phil....I love your framing too....you could almost fall into it!

Edited August 21, 2022 by peter shah

[Phillyo]

15 minutes ago, peter shah said:

Wow!....beautifully done Phil....I love your framing too....you could almost fall into it!

Thanks Peter. It's such a busy area of the sky! I definitely want to add more to it, both total time aqcuired but also adding frames to the mosaic to expand it out.

[DrMike]

Amazing. That is very impressive.

[Magnum]

Very nice Phil

[tomato]

That’s an excellent first mosaic, there is a wonderful impression of depth even on the short integration. My experience with mosaics is if the subs making up the individual panels are good, the software can do a great job of stitching them together and there are brilliant tools available now to smooth out the gradients etc.

Did you paste the moon in there? It’s a great way of illustrating the scale.

[ollypenrice]

That's great and all you need is more of the same to make an absolute winner. Everything's in place.

Olly

[Phillyo]

1 hour ago, tomato said:

That’s an excellent first mosaic, there is a wonderful impression of depth even on the short integration. My experience with mosaics is if the subs making up the individual panels are good, the software can do a great job of stitching them together and there are brilliant tools available now to smooth out the gradients etc.

Did you paste the moon in there? It’s a great way of illustrating the scale.

Thank you. Yes, I just used photoshop to add the moon to the image at the correct (ish) scale to give a real sense of the size and scale of the image. I definitely think imaging all of the panels in one night is the best way to go as it helps to alleviate a lot of issues with sky conditions. Then I can do another hour per panel another night, then more and more etc. Orrrrrr add more panels? Who knows

[Phillyo]

37 minutes ago, ollypenrice said:

That's great and all you need is more of the same to make an absolute winner. Everything's in place.

Olly

Thanks Olly. Definitely want to add a fair bit more, but as it's now going to be cloudy/rain for the next week or two...who knows when that'll happen!

Phil

[assouptro]

Beautiful image Phil 

Can you tell me what camera and scope/lens was involved and the length of your subs? 
 

I hope you get chance to add to this 😊

Thanks for sharing

Bryan 

[Phillyo]

5 minutes ago, assouptro said:

Beautiful image Phil 

Can you tell me what camera and scope/lens was involved and the length of your subs? 
 

I hope you get chance to add to this 😊

Thanks for sharing

Bryan 

All my kit is in my signature Bryan . Subs were 3min long.

Thank you,

Phil.

[gorann]

Very nice as it is and a the beginning of something outstanding! And I never realized that the Crescent was actually slightly larger than the moon😉

[Phillyo]

Added a few more panels to the mosaic, it's still lacking a lot of integration time per panel but at this scale the noise isn't super noticeable. Currently at 12 panels in a 4x3 mosaic.

ASI533, Antlia ALP-T 5nm Dual Band filter, EQ6r-Pro (having some guiding issues with large RA spikes I need to investigate, maybe cables?). NINA, Pixinsight.

Approximately 1hour per panel in 3min subs, a couple of panels have a little more as an overlap over two nights. I'll maybe try and add more data to reduce noise, we'll see how kind the cloud Gods are!!

Thanks for looking

Phil

[peonic]

Stunning.

Certainly something for a newcomer like me to aspire to!

[Paul Holdsworth]

Superb images Phil

[Phillyo]

Thank you both.