East veil nebula - 2 panel mosaic with an Antlia Triband RGB Ultra and 8'' newton

[ONIKKINEN]

Restart of the imaging season after the summer break in astro darkness. Still no astro darkness, but close enough it seems with around 3 hours of pretty good darkness to the south.

20x240s per panel for a total of 2h40min with the Antlia Triband RGB Ultra semi-narrowband filter:

 

Stacked and prepared for mosaicing in Siril and mosaiced with the Photometric mosaic script in PixInsight. SPCC and BlurXT applied in PI, stretched in Siril with Asinh and histogram transformation and finalized in Photoshop with StarXterminator amongst other tools.

Feedback is very welcome, not a proficient nebula imager myself with only a handful of targets from that category so far so likely could be improved in some area.

-Oskari

[AMcD]

Looks pretty proficient to me @ONIKKINEN, it is a stunning image.   The nebula looks three dimensional and the preservation of the star colours really increases the impact.  Fabulous 👏

[ONIKKINEN]

23 minutes ago, AMcD said:

Looks pretty proficient to me @ONIKKINEN, it is a stunning image.   The nebula looks three dimensional and the preservation of the star colours really increases the impact.  Fabulous 👏

Thank you! Preserving star colour is a strong point of the filter, it passes Ha-SII in red, O3 in green and an extra pass in blue centered around nothing specific in terms of nebulae. That extra blue makes working with stars easy since its not a pure bi-colour image.

[Neil_104]

Fantastic image. Amazing sharpness to all the tendrils. And really nice stars as well!

I much prefer this nebula orientated this way - it doesn't remind me of one of the aliens out of, um, Aliens quite so much!

[ONIKKINEN]

35 minutes ago, Neil_104 said:

Fantastic image. Amazing sharpness to all the tendrils. And really nice stars as well!

I much prefer this nebula orientated this way - it doesn't remind me of one of the aliens out of, um, Aliens quite so much!

Thank you Neil, i take it that my efforts to hide some issues with the stars were effective then because the data was far from ideal. The panels dont quite flow into each other in one area and some stars are cut off half way/maybe even missing, but im not sure it was noticeable unless you know exactly where the joint is.

[Kon]

Stunning image with a depth to it.

[peter shah]

Beautiful image and dare I say comparable something done on a mono camera.....

[Ouroboros]

Absolutely gorgeous.  Lots of detail and lovely colours. 

I have never tried a mosaic, and know almost nothing about how it is done.  I’m always slightly astonished that it appears to work so well. I naively suppose that even the slightest differences in conditions for each  set of images would make it almost impossible to make the images meld as well as they obviously do.  The wonders of software presumably - and skill in applying them. 

[ONIKKINEN]

4 hours ago, peter shah said:

Beautiful image and dare I say comparable something done on a mono camera.....

Thank you Peter! New OSC cameras are pretty good, but i do wonder how different the image would be with mono. Surprising amount of Ha here even with just 1/4th of the pixels active for that.

1 hour ago, Ouroboros said:

Absolutely gorgeous.  Lots of detail and lovely colours. 

I have never tried a mosaic, and know almost nothing about how it is done.  I’m always slightly astonished that it appears to work so well. I naively suppose that even the slightest differences in conditions for each  set of images would make it almost impossible to make the images meld as well as they obviously do.  The wonders of software presumably - and skill in applying them. 

Thank you!

2-panel mosaicing is fairly straight forward with for example AstroPixelProcessor as long as there was enough overlap in the panels. You stack the images to their own panels and then let the mosaicing software figure out how to stitch them. Like you suspected the panels will look out of place if conditions changed significantly between them though, which is why i used the at the moment probably best tool - photometric mosaic script in PixInsight because there were changing sky brightness conditions for this night. There is a bit of user input required with the PI method (and you have to read the instructions to make sense of it all), but its not too difficult for a 2 panel image where you only have to make sure the one overlap area is sound.

[tomato]

Stunning Eastern veil.👍🏼

[sinbad40]

Love the colour, very electric blue makes it pop

[Skyline]

Wonderful rendition of colour.