9-panel mosaic stretching from the core of the Milky Way in the Southern part of Ophiuchus to the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the Blue Horsehead Nebula and many other deep-sky objects in this constellation (incl. a part of Scorpius with a.o. Antares).
It's probably one of my most ambitious & difficult astro-imaging projects to date.
All data was acquired with a Nikon 200 F/2 and FLI ML16200 camera from Telescope Live in El Sauce Observatory, Chile.
FOV: 473' x 378' for each panel. An overlap of 10% was chosen for all the panels used in this mosaic image.
The final image covers a wide field of this MW-region with a field radius of about 13 degrees (see sky map).
Jarmo Ruuth’s 'Astro Mosaic Telescope Planner' tool was used to calculate the mosaic coordinates for the different panels.
AstroMosaic Telescope Planner Info (ruuth.xyz)Astro Pixel Processor (APP) was used for registrating, integrating and creating the mosaics.
Post-processing was done in Photoshop CC incl. Astronomy Tools, Topaz Sharpen AI and NoiseXTerminator plug-ins.
Min. 2 subs of 300s with LRGB were used for each panel.
Total integration time: 405 minutes.
LRGB: 22:21:19:19 sub-frames of 300s.
File size of the integrated images (for each color filter) was already 546Mb (about 140 Mpixels) and difficult to handle...
Therefore, I cropped, compressed (from 72 to 36 pixels / inch) & post-processed everything in Photoshop.
Comments