Heart nebula - Short mosaic experiment

[ONIKKINEN]

Mosaic of 6 panels, 15x60s each to a total of 1h30 taken on Thursday night under a full Moon with my 8'' newtonian and the Antlia Triband filter.

Not the best image of the Heart nebula ever taken, but its an image nonetheless. Have planned on imaging this for a while now, just have not had the right opportunity to start. Sacrificing a full Moon night to find out how much work there is in mosaicing 6 panels of a region with very little actual dark background seemed like a decent idea, since the full Moon will not allow good data to be taken anyway. Was a bit of a chore, but PixInsight and the Photometric mosaic script worked just fine so now I'm far more confident to move on with this whenever a decent night arises (next autumn, maybe, who knows).

-Oskari

[ollypenrice]

As a proof of concept it's a total success, no?

Olly

[ONIKKINEN]

1 hour ago, ollypenrice said:

As a proof of concept it's a total success, no?

Olly

Absolutely, not at all a waste of time.

[Vash]

Very nice.

I keep wanting to try doing a mosaic but keep chickening out because of how few clear nights I get!

[Laurin Dave]

Very nice... and well done.   I did a 4 panel Heart Mosaic a while back that was impossible to stitch together until Photometric Mosaic came along.. It is also very well worthwhile running the subs for each of the panels through Normalise Scale Gradient prior to integration..  This uses the same Photometric technique to normalise each of the subs to the best one thereby minimising gradients in each panel giving Photometric Mosaic the best start. 

Good luck with your project

Dave

[ONIKKINEN]

57 minutes ago, Vash said:

Very nice.

I keep wanting to try doing a mosaic but keep chickening out because of how few clear nights I get!

Thanks, try it out on some dodgy Moonlit night where the loss of a night is not so big a deal. 2-panel mosaics are pretty straightforward in PI or APP, and you could bin x2 to make up for the less time per panel problem, which would still result in an appreciable image size in the end.

24 minutes ago, Laurin Dave said:

Very nice... and well done.   I did a 4 panel Heart Mosaic a while back that was impossible to stitch together until Photometric Mosaic came along.. It is also very well worthwhile running the subs for each of the panels through Normalise Scale Gradient prior to integration..  This uses the same Photometric technique to normalise each of the subs to the best one thereby minimising gradients in each panel giving Photometric Mosaic the best start. 

Good luck with your project

Dave

Thank you,

I have looked into NSG for PI, but have not bought it yet. My current strategy is to shoot an even number of subs of all the panels per night, so the gradients dont get to be significantly different from panel to panel as they were taken under very similar conditions- for example for this one i did 5x60s per panel and ran the sequence 3 full times. I am hoping that does the trick, but i expect to need NSG sooner or later since a night could easily be cut short by inaccurate forecasts or a dozen other reasons why plans dont always work.