Large Magellanic Cloud-Host to Abundant Nebulae (8-Panel SHO Mosaic)

OTA: FSQ106
Camera: QHY 600M (9576 x 6382 pixels)
Observatory: Telescope Live
Date of Capture: Oct '23
Date of Processing: Feb '24

Exposures:
H: 181 of 210 x 900 sec
O: 168 of    "    x    "
S:  174 of    "    x    "  
Total Exposure time: 134 hours
Image Width: 5.3 degrees

Processing Tools:
1.    Commercial: PixInsight, Topaz (Studio2, GigaPixel),
2.    Pixinsight Addons: NoiseXTerminator, BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator
3.    My Scripts: NB_Assistant, AC_Restar, Subframe Weighting Tool (Excel w/ J. Hunt)

Target Description:
As most of you undoubtedly know, the Large Magellanic Cloud is a dwarf satellite of our Milky Way galaxy. It is an active place for star formation as gravitational interactions with the MY and the Small Magellanic Cloud (there's even a dust/gas stream connecting the LMC and SMC) mobilize the gases into cloud collisions and consequent star formation, which lights and stimulates the nebulae seen here.

Processing Description:
For months after downloading this vast data set, I sat staring in fear at the list of raw images I needed to manipulate and process. Thankfully, they were pre-calibrated, but that was far from the magnitude of the tasks left to be done. My processing train is detailed; I do not use automated tools like WBPP, wanting to control everything from the per-image weightings to the image tagged as the best one for alignment or the best ones for normalizations. So, a fatiguing 20 hours later, I had an 8-pannel mosaic spanning some 14.5K x 15.6K pixels—after cropping…the mosaic was not well planned, and overlaps were chaotic and uneven. The spatial coverage was, therefore, less than it should have been. But, the data were of good quality and indeed of great quantity.

For the first time, I successfully used the Mosaic-By-Coordinates tool in PixInsight…success in only 4 attempts! Admittedly, the chaotic disposition of panorama tiles was no help! Next time, I will revert to Panorama Studio; it is much easier and does an excellent job on the first try.

For mosaicing, I down-sampled 2x, then another 2x down-sampling for posting. The detail in the final image is stunning, but nothing like that in the entire image!

Statistics:
Distance: 163K ly
Apparent Magnitude: 0.13
Average Surface Magnitude: 25 mag/arcsec
Pixel Span at Target: 4.4T km

Alex Woronow