50 pane mosaic - MCs to Pointers to Carina

[CalvinKlein]

Whilst visiting family in NZ last week I got the chance to spend a few hours doing a dark sky astrophotography session with my brother near the base of Mt Hutt ski-field. One of the goals was to create a 7x7 high resolution mosaic of the region from the SMC to LMC to Carina to the Pointers, something I haven't been able to do around my home region of northern NSW do to its high latitude. (I havent worked out how the 50th image snuck in there)
I used a Canon 6D with a 135mm Samyang F2 at F2.4 with a panoramic ballhead on top of my Star Adventurer EQ mount.
AstroPixel Processor did an incredible job of blending the 50 images in one run, but I had awful blending lines due to vignetting.
So I put the camera and lens in the fridge yesterday for a while (which I figured was a good approximation to the 5 degrees we were photographing in) and took a full set of calibration frames then reprocessed. The flats in particular helped immensely and I just needed a bit of help from APP's light pollution removal tool to tidy the blending lines up a bit.

Can anyone suggest a good place to host the full sized version ?

(Footnote: I managed to create myself an Astrobin profile and made this my first image)

https://www.astrobin.com/full/xffh6e/0/?nc=user

[strongmanmike]

Great job Kelvin :thumbsup:

Mike

[Ryderscope]

Nicely done Kelvin. Try Gigapan for hosting the large size file. It has a minimum image size of fifty mega pixels.

[CalvinKlein]

Thanks Rodney - I'll give that a go. This one comes in at 52 mega pixels so just makes the grade. I just made it my first Astrobin image - link is in original post.




Thanks very much Mike:)

[Atmos]

Certainly a large mosaic that has come together really well :) Congratulations Kelvin :thumbsup:
It’s come out relatively clean, how much integration did you have per panel?

[CalvinKlein]

Thanks very much Colin - you inspired me to have a go at it. Its only a 10 second single image per panel. I didnt have enough time to get any more as the Milky Way was rapidly setting over the snow-capped mountains which was my second imaging target.

[Atmos]

For only 10s images it’s come out really clean!

[gregbradley]

That link does not work for me.

Greg.

[CalvinKlein]

I was very surprised how well it turned out for only about 25 minutes total imaging ! (10 sec image / 15 sec move to next position). It did need the flats however and the flats needed bias (a tip I read on APP forum to prevent "over-flattening"). Oh and APP took about 7 hours to do the calibration and mosaic processing !



Astrobin seemed to have issues yesterday greg - I had "502 bad gateway" errors around the time I was posting this and creating my profile.

[Slawomir]

A very nice mosaic Kelvin :thumbsup:

[CalvinKlein]

Thank you very much Suavi :)

[gregbradley]

That link worked now.

You could up the curves on the Milky Way arm. LMC and SMC are quite bright but the MWay is dim. Also a slight pinkish colour bias on my monitor.

But 50 pane mosaic is worth some serious processing redos if needed. I'd say there is a lot in that MWay arm that can be coaxed out.

Greg.

[codemonkey]

Very nice, Kelvin! Pretty amazing for only 1x10s sub per panel :eyepop: Colour looks different between IIS and Astrobin? The latter look a touch too green to my eye.