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Hi Jase,
I think you forgot to post the link.
Yes a mosaic is one way to go. Certainly a mosaic at longer focal lengths will get more resolution - without a doubt.
The 16803 should fit any scope that can handle an STL as it is basically a square 11002 in size give or take a mm. I am expecting the FSQ with reducer to handle it OK, perhaps slight vignetting, but flats should handle it - here's hoping. It handles the STL11 easily. Quite a remarkable optical feat really, the sort of thing you'd expect from Roland Christian.
Yes I have Astronomik LRGB and Astrodon 5nm S11 O111 and Ha 50mm square filters and am also getting the Baader version of the LRGBC as they seem the best on the market at the moment. Astrodon narrowband are fine in 50mm square. You'll notice a number of Astrodon 50mm square LRGB filters for sale on Astromart. That's because they have a bad reflection problem with these big chipped cameras. Even the STL it can be a problem at times although they are overall very good. The series 11 are supposed to handle the reflection problem but a friend emailed me a sample image and it still had annoying reflections - better but not good enough. FLI research 50mm square filters also seem fine.
Mosaics are tricky though. It'd be nice to find some sort of a writeup on tips on how to do them. One guy suggested running Gradient Xterminator on each panel before combining which makes sense. Also perhaps a gradient mask to help wth the blend. Rob Gendler mentioned once he matches the brightness of the background and does not necessarily go for equal exposures on each panel.
Do you have any tips? I have done 2 mosaics now and the difficulty was the blend line. One decision I made was about mosaics would be to take the panels over a few days as you need ideally to image in the same angle of the sky for each panel within a range. If you try to do 5 hours worth the last few will be low in the sky and get too much red. Difficult if you have a time constraint like I do travelling to my dark site and only there 3 or 4 nights. Although at this time of year its not uncommon to get 4 nights in a row that are perfect. 3 is likely, 2 would be a bummer and 1 only would be rare.
Rob Gendler's Vela SNR and Tarantula Nebula mosaics are totally amazing.
I'd like to do something like that at some point.
Greg.
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