While it's not a highly spectacular image I personally think it's my finest, especially as it's the first deep sky mosaic I've ever made.
From the sky of my location in the Italian Alps of Val d'Aosta I joined 10 panels obtained by a sum, for each one, of the stacking of 10 exposures from 30 seconds to gain 300 using a 183mm ASI camera.
For shooting I used an old Soviet JUPITER 21M telephoto lens with the aperture set to f 5.6 and a "G" filter (500-600 nanometers).
The short integration for each panel (only 5 minutes) and the high gain kept a lot of background noise but the result still looks nice.
The images were taken with the "live stacking" method with Sharpcap and "sigma clipping" algorithm to avoid satellite traces.All images are taken without autoguiding on a Skywatcher EQ6R-PRO mountI could not use any automatic composition program so the mosaic was created manually with photoshop (a job that took me two hours).
To be properly appreciated, the image must be viewed at full resolution.
www.dark-star.it
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