Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Cygnus Region Mosaic, David Schlaudt

Cygnus Region Mosaic

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
Cygnus Region Mosaic, David Schlaudt

Cygnus Region Mosaic

Equipment

Loading...

Acquisition details

Loading...

Description

This is my 6 panel mosaic of the Cygnus region of the Milky Way including the North America Nebula and Gamma Cygni Nebula which includes the Crescent Nebula and Butterfly Nebula.  The image also includes the bright stars Deneb which is part of the Summer Triangle (along with Vega and Altair).  Deneb is also the head of the Swan in the Cygnus constellation.  This region of the sky is most prominent during the summer months and is directly overhead in my night skies through much of the nights in August and September. This was my first attempt at a mosaic with my new setup including the Rokinon 135mm and ZWO ASI 1600mm Pro.  I loved this setup as it is light and portable and could actually be put on my Skywatcher Star Adventurer, though I did most of this imaging on my trusty AZEQ6GT.  I’ll also continue to sing the praises of the ZWO ASIAIR Pro, it makes setup and in this case planning a mosaic SO EASY.  The go-to functionality on the ASIAIR app allows you to quickly point to the exact part of the sky you want to hone in on and through some very quick plate solving it will center the telescope/lens directly on what you’re looking to image. Shooting and then processing a mosaic is always a time consuming endeavor and, as perhaps I should have expected, this project ended up consuming my imaging time through much of the summer.  In addition, I decided to shift my pre processing work over to Pixinsight which took quite a bit of learning.  I was using Pixinsight for a couple routines like background neutralization or background extraction but I had never tried to solely rely on it for all the preprocessing steps and the initial image processing work.  I found the result to be better star alignment and image integration across the different mosaic panels, but perhaps greatest benefit came from the incredibly powerful pixel math operation which allows you to combine narrowband channels in any combination you can think of.  I’ve always struggled creating an SHO image which I found satisfying but this is probably the closest I’ve come IMHO thanks to pixel math.

Comments

Histogram

Cygnus Region Mosaic, David Schlaudt

In these public groups

ZWO ASI1600MM/QHY163M