Celestial hemisphere:  Southern  ·  Constellation: Tucana (Tuc)  ·  Contains:  Extremely wide field
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SMC Mosiac Panels 1 - 6, Rodney Watters
SMC Mosiac Panels 1 - 6
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SMC Mosiac Panels 1 - 6

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
SMC Mosiac Panels 1 - 6, Rodney Watters
SMC Mosiac Panels 1 - 6
Powered byPixInsight

SMC Mosiac Panels 1 - 6

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

I'm now more than half way through this rather large project to complete a mosaic of the Small Magellanic Cloud with my Tak TSA120 and QSI CCD camera. I have set myself a target of 12 panels that will capture most of the SMC without including the nearby globular clusters of NGC 104 and NGC 362. Each panel is comprised of data captured through four filters, Ha, R, G & B. RGB subs are 5 minutes each and the Ha is 20 minutes per sub. All up the project will make for some large numbers. My target is to capture at least 30 good subs for each of the RGB filters and at least 20 subs for the Ha.

For the six panels that I have included in this image, there are a total of 650 subs for an integration time of over 84 hours (not counting the bad subs that have been thrown in the bit bucket!). The file sizes for the 650 subs add up to 10.8 Giga Bytes of data. The field of view for each frame is approximately 1.5 degrees by 1.0 degrees and I allowed a 20% overlap between each frame during data capture.

This project started in 2017 with the capture of the first batch of data and at this stage it is looking like it will be the end of the 2020 calendar year before I can finish the data capture (date of posting this update is February 2020). There are ten completed panels worth of data in the can so far and due to bush fire smoke, dust storms, clouds and now rain it has not been possible to capture any data since October 2019 - nearly four months ago. By the time that the SMC swings back around to a reasonable height again it is going to be September/October.

Data acquisition software is SGP Pro and processing has been completed entirely using Pixinsight 1.8.8-4. Mosaic construction in PI made use of the Mosaic by Coordinates and Gradient Merge Mosaic tools.

I have provided a link to a copy of the image on the Giga Pan site which is good for viewing very high resolution images. It is best viewed on a 21" screen or above and use the Giga Pan full screen mode to zoom in close. Once in full screen mode you can use the scroll button on the mouse to zoom in and out.

Now that panels 1 - 6 are complete I will start work on the next three panels to integrate them into the mosiac.

Clear skies,

Rodney.

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SMC Mosiac Panels 1 - 6, Rodney Watters

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Deep Sky Mosaics