Mosaic

[Gavin1234]

I’ve started working on a wide field mosaic. Not sure if it will work or not and it’s a lot of data to capture and precious clear sky time only to find out it won’t work so I thought I’d check with you guys before I go any further.

I don’t have an auto rotator. I’m using SGP’s plate solving, framing and mosaic wizard to capture. Anyone have any experience with this? Do I need an auto camera rotator for it to work?

The mosaic will be 16 frames, I’m planning on doing 20 x 5 min subs for each frame initially. Then after checking that I’ll do 100 x 5 min per frame and see how that looks.

[Atmos (Colin)]

You don't need a rotator of doing a mosaic as you want to try to keep the orientation the same between each frame.

I used SGP Mosaic Wizard to create these two mosaics:

Milky Way
Small Magellanic Cloud

The idea is to keep the orientation as close to the same as possible so that no only each sub in each frame is the same from night to night but also so that each frame matches up and overlaps nicely.

[RyanJones]

Both beautiful images there Gavin. Great work !

[Gavin1234]

Thanks Colin. My 16 frames are covering Orion and horsehead which is drowning in moonlight at the moment so I’ll have to come back to it later.

I love both of your mosaics but that Milky Way shot is amazing!

So I guess I want to try and get the mosaic done over a short period of time to ensure the orientation is the same?

I’ve set up the framing with plate solving and saved the sequence, so the frames should be OK? It’s just the orientation I need to,worry about?

Haha Ryan those are both Colin’s. I only wish I could do that

[RyanJones]

Ah yes Gavin. So they are lol. I need to learn to read better.

Beautiful images Colin !

[Atmos (Colin)]

Thanks Ryan

As someone that has to set up every imaging night I use the plate solver to figure out orientation. I’ve spent a good portion of this year working on a larger mosaic and it was generated with the orientation at 120°. I knew roughly the orientation of the camera visually but I would use a plate silver to refuel that to within 1.5°. Bit tedious but only takes a minute or two.

90° is the most common angle so an orientation of 90° or 180+90° (depending on the side of meridian you’re on) but you just need to work with what you’ve created your mosaic as.

[ChrisV (Chris)]

Beautiful images Colin. Tell me how you go Gavin. I'd like to try a Mosaic and I suppose I should give SGP a go.

[Gavin1234]

Thanks again Colin. Haven’t had much of a chance yet with the bad weather and now the moon, but I’m chipping away at it whenever I get a chance.

I’ll post my results as soon as I get at least 20 subs of each piece.