Rho Op region

[The_bluester (Paul)]

Back to the beginners section for me. This is my first crack at a mosaic. Very limited data this time out as it is more of a framing test than anything else. 12 panels using the Evostar 72 and reducer and ASI294MC Pro camera, 5 minute subs, guided. 6 X subs on all bar one panel as I ran out of night and only got 5 good ones. Cropped to 16:9 sizing using probably the area of 9 out of the 12 frames, but not lined up neatly, it is probably cropping out half of the first and last rows.

Now to work out where the reflection issue is! Thankfully it is only apparent on the brightest of stars. I am thinking I will mount my wife's DSLR if I can get the spacing right and try that.

I don't consider this a finished product by any stretch, more of an experiment to find out the weak points. For one I need a PC with more grunt to integrate these things!

[Jeff]

That's pretty decent Paul … lovely part of the sky.
You've done well to capture the whole region.

[The_bluester (Paul)]

It was a bit of an education to integrate it I can tell you. My poor old PC spent most of the weekend warming the room up and in the end I had to borrow my wife's (I built her a decent one about a year ago, triple the amount of memory, twice the number of processor cores, faster drives etc when compared to mine) apart from being slow, mine simply did not have enough memory to put together the final mosaic without downscaling it.

I ended up integrating the panels individually and then integrating the results as a mosaic to build that so I could try different blending settings without redoing the entire creature but it really does suffer from a lack of integration time on each of the panels.

I also reckon I have found a limitation of my camera, the diffraction pattern around Antares I believe is the ASI294 equivalent of the ASI1600 microlensing reflection issue. It shows up only on the brightest stars, and the faster the optics the more pronounced it is. I tested last night by taking shots of Gacrux and rotating the camera (I have a rotator that allows me to move the imaging camera independently of everything else including the OAG) and the diffraction pattern remains in the same orientation no matter how it relates to the sky, so it seems to be in the camera itself. Something I will just have to live with I guess.