How to do a mosaic?

[xelasnave]

Any suggestions outside of PI?
Alex

[CalvinKlein (Kelvin)]

Sequence Generator Pro has a great Framing and Mosaic wizard. I'm yet to make better use of its functionality

Me personally, I've mostly rotated my camera to the best angle in its guide rings and then moved the scope manually in Stellarium (via Stellarium Scope). I started doing this manual technique on my Star Adventurer and DSLR - most I did this way was 3 x 4 at 135mm from memory.

[RickS (Rick)]

Registar is the gold standard for mosaic registration. Astro Pixel Processor seems to be good at mosaic assembly too from what I've heard. There are also generic photography tools that will let you assemble processed panels like Microsoft ICE.

Disclaimer: I've only actually constructed mosaics using PI

Cheers,
Rick.

[Atmos (Colin)]

When you mean mosaic, do you mean creating the physical locations of the panels that make the mosaic OR you have the images already and you want to assemble them?

[xelasnave]

Thanks all for the helpful comments.
Colin I am starting from scratch.
I have in mind maybe doing one of Orion.
Alex

[bojan]

Alex, try Registar.


This LMC was done some time ago with 300mm Canon lens, using 9 stacks.

Exposure time was only 30 sec, so the image is not very deep, but you can't see where the stitches are - Registar did a wonderful job.

[Atmos (Colin)]

SGP has a really helpful Framing and Mosaic Wizard that makes building mosaics up to 50 panels quite easy UNLESS you are going for a really wide field. Anything more than about 15-20°FOV can take forever to load.

For either more than 50 panels or for 20°+ I have found that TheSkyX is the best, especially after I came up with a way of importing TSX panel data into SGP for image capture.
For instance, when I was creating this Milky Way mosaic with an 85mm lens and Nikon D7200, SGP couldn’t handle the wideness of the FOV but it took a minute to frame and create it in TSX.

[Lognic04 (Logan)]

Questions...
Can you do mosaics properly with bad stars at the edge? how many frames can you reasonably do without an obs?

[bojan]

Originally Posted by Lognic04

Questions...
Can you do mosaics properly with bad stars at the edge? how many frames can you reasonably do without an obs?

You can always crop out bad edges...

[that_guy (Tony)]

Originally Posted by Lognic04

Questions...
Can you do mosaics properly with bad stars at the edge? how many frames can you reasonably do without an obs?

You can increase the overlap to take in to account the bad edges.

[xelasnave]

Thanks to all.
I read about Registar on their site and it got me wondering.
Could I combine images taken thru the eight inch and the 80 mm one using zwo and the other using the nikon?☺
Alex

[Atmos (Colin)]

Originally Posted by xelasnave

Thanks to all.
I read about Registar on their site and it got me wondering.
Could I combine images taken thru the eight inch and the 80 mm one using zwo and the other using the nikon?☺
Alex

AstroPixelProcessor (APP) apparently does a pretty good job at doing that. I have some data from four different setups that I'd like to try to combine at some point but I know it'll be quite painful to do!

APP is very good with dealing with the different image scales from what I've heard. I bought it specifically for dealing with mosaics and I'm quite happy with it so far.