I've been meaning to shoot the Heart Nebula for some time now, primarily as a gift to my wife and her parents, but also because it is such a vibrant nebula. This is because in June 2017, my dear brother-in-law, Craig, my wife's younger brother, unexpectedly died in his early 40s. He was a strong force in our lives, and we all loved him dearly.

Craig was a gifted yoga instructor, and one of his passions was art, mainly mixed media, and often, of hearts. These weren't your classic cherubic hearts often seen around Valentine's Day; they were stretched, bent, irregular, and sometimes twisted.

So whenever I see the Heart Nebula, I think of Craig. Here is how I captured this target for him.

As I mentioned at the start, I have wanted to image this for some time now, but I don't own an imaging train with a wide enough FOV to fit this target comfortably. So, I had to shoot a mosaic with my trusty 127mm refractor. Also daunting is that my previous mosaics have all be 1x2s, so a 2x2 with good SNR is definitely a hefty time investment complete with frustration. But it was time...

I started this in late October, using my fully completed backyard observatory. With a permanent setup now, I was able to image even for just a few hours before Maine clouds rolled in. I ended up with a total of around 65h collected, with about 7h blinked out and a minimal 4h rejected by PI's SFS.

To deal with the challenging gradients I get from neighborhood LP as I swing across my Bortle 4 Eastern sky to Bortle 6 Western sky, I used the latest 1.11 nightly builds of NINA and its new highly configurable sequencer. I basically looped throughout the night until Nautical Dawn (or a time when I knew clouds were going to move in), and during that time-based loop, I looped over 3 frames per panel, each, over and over again. I did this to ensure I had the same number of good dark-sky frames and lesser LP-washed frames in all panels, thus avoiding heavy gradient disparities between the panels.

Once all the data was collected, I was given a tip by a CN member named Eyal (handle: imtl) to use the downloadable PhotometricMosaic script, developed by John Murphy, for PixInsight. This is a fantastic script which I now recommend to anyone doing mosaics via PI. It adjusts the background scale, by using photometry to compare the stars, and offset in the overlap region. I believe Juan will be adding this script to the base PI download in the next release, 1.8.8-7. Look for it if you do mosaics and don't already know about it.

Well, now that it's done, I call out to all you fine folk for any constructive feedback before I send the image off for printing on metal (the gift)

Thanks for looking and stay safe wherever you are.

CS, Ara