mosaic help

[graham.hobart]

Hello!
I used Registar to combine these 2 Ha pics of Carina, but don't like the edges and the gaps, so I wish to do more but am at a loss at which software to soften the edges/blend, and also overlap?
I had SG pro on an old laptop which went defunct and am loath to buy it again as I have APP and Maxim DL.
Any advice gratefully received.
cheers
Graz

[rbronca]

Give Microsoft ICE a try. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computational-photography-applications/image-composite-editor/

It is by far the easiest Mosaic creation tool I have used. Make sure the source images are 16 bit tif's first.

[graham.hobart]

Well that worked better!! Thanks for the tip!

[Andy01]

There's a very good tutorial for Registar mosaics here - http://geoastro.co.uk/mosaic/mosaic.htm :)

[The_bluester]

If you are doing a mosaic in Astro Pixel Processor, make sure you use advanced mode in the normalisation tab and local normalisation correction in the integration tab (Start with the lowest level and three iterations and see how it goes) and tick multi band blending too with the slider set to roughly the overlap percentage between frames.

Also, it is not much of an impost on registration if you only have a handful of frames and subs, but mosaic integration can be really time consuming. That one being two panels (With however many subs on each panel) don't use mosaic registration in APP. You can use normal registration so long as all frames overlap the reference frame and it is much faster to register if you have lots of subs. In theory you could register up to a 9 panel mosaic in normal registration mode (With one central frame and 8 others arranged around it, all overlapping) so long as the reference frame was one of the central ones.

[multiweb]

You need top re-register all your subs to the union master you created in registar then save them as separate files to blend in photoshop as in Andy's link. A quick way is to load all the layers, delete all the black background parts then do an auto blend in PS if there's enough overlap. Some stars in the overlaps look better on some layers than others so cut out the bad ones making sure you're not leaving gaps and PS will do the rest. Also try to get the panels contrast similar to start with so there's not one very bright one with other dark ones or the blend will look funny.