As many of you know I have been mentioning about doing a large mosaic for the last 6-8 weeks; well, on Saturday night I headed up to Hay and camped out at the Showgrounds for a night of imaging. I got a 10x10 panel mosaic of the central region of the Milky Way.
This is a little teaser that I have managed to quickly put together. Right now I am still in the stage of "How the hell am I going to process this!". Largely trying to figure out how to get a nice stitch between the frames, going to be difficult I think.
It isn't exactly as good as I have been hoping to get but considering how late in the season (the last new moon possible this year) it is pretty much the best that I could do. Doing a 10x10 panel mosaic with 60s exposures had me starting at 35º and ending at 31º. Realistically I would have loved 120s exposures at this is what I know I need to become sky limited, at 60s it is still very noisy! Makes it difficult to make the nebulosity to pop
This particular image is a test region before I really start processing the rest of the mosaic, still trying to figure out the best way to do it. Thinking I may have to do a whole bunch of 2x2 boxes and then stitch them together. Once I get it all together it'll look nicer when printed on a 12x8 print as the noise gets down sized as I approach a 1 gigapixel image.
Anyway, this is Bigfoot stomping on the Triffid. To give a bit of an idea of the field, this field here is approx. 4% of the total image area that I captured! I'll get back with the other 96% in a month or two when I finish processing it!!
And for all of your pixel peepers,
here is the high res 
