My main target while at La Silla back in July 2019. This is a two panel mosaic made over two nights. The Samyang 135 is used at F/2.0. The halo on the middle-left comes from nearby Jupiter.
It was too windy out there for the staradventurer mini (lended by
João Marques, thanks to him!). I tried to protect my little setup downwind from the two water tanks next to the NTT 3.6 m telescope but that was not enough. I had to drop quite a few frames but the stars are still not perfect. I may try to improve that later by dropping more frames.
It took me some time to process as I wanted to improve my code since my first post of the
LMC. All processing in Python except for the stitching, made with Phosohop's photomerge feature (Rev. A) and ICE (Rev. E). There are still many aspects to work on but I'm happy enough with the result to share it. Feedback most welcome!
Rev. E (06 Jan. 2020): that one has no white balance correction. I intentionally turned down the reds in Rev. A. but I think that was not justified. I was also removing a large scale gradient that cancelled most of the glow from the Milky Way but I actually prefer it that way. Finally, following
Sigga's comment on my
Deneb & friends mosaic, I also re-did the stitching using
Microsoft ICE. That was good advice as that software is easy to use and immediately gave me better results and more control than Photoshop's photomerge feature. It in particular allowed me to minimize the distortion, which apparently hampered the initial plate solving of Rev. A. Thanks!
Rev. G (21 Aug. 2020): re-stacking with better sigma-clipping, improved star reduction & new stretch, resulting in slightly tighter stars and better detail in the globular clusters.
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