Hey all,
Thanks for the pointers to APP. I grabbed their 30-day free trial and spent last night learning the (very) basics of how to drive it.
Somehow I managed to get a very clean mosaic out the end of the process. I want to go back and do it all again because I missed a setting to do with light pollution removal when I was stacking each of the 4 panels. Oops...
Chris/SB - I specified a 10% overlap when setting up the mosaic panels in the Ekos 'Mosaic Creator' tool.
I think the problem came from the stacking artifacts in SiriL - there were horrible lines and purple streaks along the edges of the panels that looked to be as wide as (or wider) than the 10% margin and they confused Affinity's panorama tool.
Stacking the same subs in APP with MBB and NLC enabled gave me clean panels with no garbage on the edges - and much better colour / detail overall. The mosaic came out with no visible seams and a balanced colour palette across the entire image.
Nik - WOW! That's a total ripper of an image. I can't wait to see what the final product looks like.
Now I know what APP can do, I will go back and reprocess old image data with it and see what comes out. Expect a flood of images over in the image section...
Thanks again for the pointers.
Cheers,
V