M8 Lagoon Nebula, 2 panel Mosaic

[joshman]

Each panel has approximately 25 hours of integration, and I put together this Mosaic more as a exploration of mosaic stitching in PixInsight than anything, as I had imaged the Main Lagoon complex and the "Puddle" separately.

The puddle panel was taken at a 90 degree orientation to the main Lagoon complex so a large amount of the frame got discarded in the final crop. I'm still on the fence about the processing, I'd like the puddle to be brighter, but the 2 frames are very well balanced,both in total exposure time, and as far as gradients and brightness levels. You can see my efforts in trying to brighten the Puddle with my original upload on Astrobin.

Because I had to lose a large amount of the puddle frame in this crop, I'll probably use it as the basis for a new mosaic next season; there appears to be quite a lot of interesting nebulosity hanging out between the Lagoon and the Trifid.

Check it out on Astrobin (https://astrob.in/0u7oed/B/) to see the imaging details and make sure to see it large!

C&C is welcome!

Thanks for looking and Clear Skies!

[matlud]

Nice one Josh!

[Startrek]

Josh,
An excellent mosaic , gee you’ve poured some serious hours into this one ( don’t know where you scored all those clear nights , east coast has been limited for months )
Colour palette is pleasing
Well done indeed !!
My only observation (and it’s only my opinion by the way ) I reckon there’s loads more detail in the outer structures. The outer structures and interstellar background seems quite dim or limited in dynamic ms as with the Star field. Maybe this is a unique feature of Pi processing which you like , I use Startools which a completely different processing animal ( signal evolution tracking engine )
A great image just the same

Cheers
Martin

[joshman]

Thanks Matt!

Josh,
An excellent mosaic , gee you’ve poured some serious hours into this one ( don’t know where you scored all those clear nights , east coast has been limited for months )
Colour palette is pleasing
Well done indeed !!
[/QUOTE]

Thanks Martin, I had a very good night of clear nights over winter. So i used the opportunity to go pretty deep on a bunch of targets.


You're not wrong! there is so much detail in the outer structures! I found it hard to balance the intense brightness of the Lagoon core while still retaining visible detail in the outer structures. The detail is still there, just subdued somewhat.
I'm sitting on at least a half-dozen different processing attempts in trying to strike that balance without flattening the image.

I've attached a stacked and processed image of just the "Puddle" frame which i'm reasonably pleased with the processing for, I was aiming to process the mosaic pretty closely to what I'd lucked into with just the puddle.

[Nikolas]

Nothing to add, I love it

[Dave882]

I love the extended detail you’ve got here. Great colour and seamless mosaic. Great work!

[joshman]

Thanks Nik!




Thanks Dave! The PI mosaic process is quite involved, but produces nice results. It'd be nice to see some improvements to the mosaic tools in PI to make it a more seamless(pun intended?) process.