Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic (Alex Woronow)

Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic

Messier 8: 9-panel Mosaic

OTA: CDK24” f/6.5
Camera: Moravian C3-61000 Pro
Observatory: Heaven's Mirror, Chile

Exposures: 9 Panels of H,R,G,B with approximately 18 x 300-sec exposures of each per pannel. Total Exposure time used: approximately 54 hours.

Image Width: 1.3 degrees; 2x2 binned at capture and another 0.5 down-sampling for this posting.

Processing Tools:
1.   Commercial: PixInsight, Topaz Studio, Topaz Denoise, Topaz Gigapixel, Aurora HDR, Luminar Neo, 3DLUT Creator, PanaramaStudio 3Pro
2.   Pixinsight Addons: NoiseXTerminator, BlurXTerminator, StarXTerminator, Normalize Scale Gradient
3.   My Scripts: NB_Assistant, AC_Restar, Subframe Weighting Tool

Target Description:
Messier 8 is a well-known object suffering an almost endless litany of portraits. Its pink-to-red dominant color arises from the ionization and recombination of hydrogen atoms by UV radiation from massive stars hidden within the nebula.

The width of the nebula is about 140 light-years, and its height is about 60 ly. Since this image, as shown, spans 1200 pixels, each pixel spans about 1 trillion km! Fine detail in the image is anything but small.

Processing Description:
Total processing time, from image blinking and calibration to assembling the mosaic, processing the colors, and adding back the stars, took me about 10 hours. Then, I did another version and another, and …. In the process, I developed a better way to make a star mask and, by association, to replace the stars in a starless processed image, which exploits the alpha-compositing paradigm.

Alex Woronow

Final
Original
B

B

Description: With Stars

Uploaded: ...

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8379055
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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