This is a high-resolution panorama of the Milky Way as we would see it setting in the west in the Southern hemisphere, extending from the Carina Nebula at the left to the North America Nebula at the right.
Comet C/2017 K2 Panstarrs made a guest appearance and can be seen near the nose of the Blue Horsehead nebula .
This has been by far my biggest project to date taking a total of five months to manually plan the mosaic in Stellarium and on paper, acquire the data, figure out how to stitch it all together at full resolution and process it.
Most of the acquisition was performed under Bortle 2 skies as well as some from my Bortle 4 back yard.
For image acquisition I used a dual camera arrangement consisting of an astro modified CentralDS Canon 6D and Sigma
85mm F/1.4 Art at F/2.8 along side a ZWO ASI294MC Pro with a Sigma 40MM F/1.4 Art at F/2.8. The two combinations were chosen due to their similar field of view. The cameras were manually rotated for each frame. The images were acquired in two simultaneous sessions of Sequence Generator Pro.
The RGB data from the two cameras was first integrated together in Astro Pixel Processor for each of the 46 panels, then light pollution gradients removed. 4 panels of Hydrogen Alpha were acquired separately using a monochrome camera with the 40mm lens.
All the resultant 46 RGB panels were registered and integrated in Astro Pixel Processor using its Mercator Projection method, producing a 6 gigabyte FITS file with a resolution of 33748 x 15840, (later cropped to a 30580 x 11020 TIF).
Final processing and layer assembly, contrast and colour enhancement were performed in Photoshop.
Eventually my goal is to add the region from the Carina Nebula to the California Nebula which includes the constellation Orion and the Vela Supernova Remnant. However due to the high number of cloudy nights between September and February in my coastal region of Australia I expect this could take two or more years.
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