This in an experiment in constructing a very large mosaic. The building blocks came from The STSci Digitized Sky Survey, POSS2 Red database. The red filtered database was used because it contained both the H-alpha and Sulfer 2 lines from these emission nebula. Twenty four 60 x 60 arcsec frames were downloaded as fits files. The individual frames were stitched together using the PixInsight mosaic process as described in the Steve Allen video.

This is a very large file (14,000 x 8,426 pixeL). There are tons of detail. It was actually downsampled. The original image was 16,000 x 11,000 pixels and too large to upload here. Be sure to zoom in on the image. or if you like, download the entire file.

To construct this mosaic, I took my earlier wide-field view of the Heart and Soul Nebula (http://www.astrobin.com/132006/B/) and cut it into 24 equal squares in PhotoShop as if it were a sliced web page. Each square was exported from PhotoShop into a jpeg file and its coordinates analyzed in http://nova.astrometry.net. Those coordinates were used to select the file to download from the POSS2 database. The files from PhotoShop were approzimately 45 x 45 arcmin. The downloads from the POSS2 database were 60 x 60 arcmin (their maximum size). So there was plenty of overlap for the mosaic.

This mosaic took two days to assemble. The last step in the assembly itself, took a capable desktop almost two hours of processing time.

PLATE SOLVE

Center (RA, Dec): (40.928, 61.061)

Center (RA, hms): 02h 43m 42.782s

Center (Dec, dms): +61° 03' 40.358"

Size: 5.03 x 3.03 deg

Radius: 2.935 deg

Pixel scale: 9.05 arcsec/pixel

Orientation: Up is -179 degrees E of N

The Digitized Sky Surveys were produced at the Space Telescope Science Institute under U.S. Government grant NAG W-2166. The images of these surveys are based on photographic data obtained using the Oschin Schmidt Telescope on Palomar Mountain and the UK Schmidt Telescope. The plates were processed into the present compressed digital form with the permission of these institutions.