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Dave,
Mosaics are quite difficult.
Overlap by 20%.
Its best to image the same time and position in the sky each night rather than several panels in a night at different angles in the sky. They will look different.
Stitching is tricky and blends difficult. There are several approaches. Pix Insight had the edge at one stage but its not a particularly user friendly program but they do have video tutorials which is a big plus.
Photoshop CS4 and above has a pretty decent stitching program. Below that its pretty ordinary.
I am planning to use PTGui Pro to stitch my next mosaic as it does a great job on terrestial images. Hopefully it will on astro images.
Tony Hallas instructional video has a section on doing and processing mosaics. Its somewhat helpful. Nevertheless a tricky proposition in both acquisition and processing.
Also label everything very well. I did a 16 panel mosaic and spent hours trying to work out where one or two non descript panel fitted in to the jigsaw puzzle!
Try to do the same exposures etc on each.
Prepare to spend a lot of time in processing and learning.
I found taking a 10 minute luminance and then loading the luminances of the other panels into Photoshop CS4 before committing to a night of imaging a panel worked well. You can see if the panels overlap on all sides well enough and don't leave gaps that will defeat the mosaic.
Greg.
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