What a journey, thats all I can to say!

This massive project started in mid to late march this year (2023), where I did some automated mosaic tests with my freshly installed remote telescope at e-EyE in southern Spain!

BUT we have to start ealier:
I always had a fascination for big pictures, be it large landscape panoramas or deepsky mosaics with a wide field of view.
Last year I followed the process of Bray Falls setting up his new telescope rig for such images, a Takahashi FS-Q 106 with a qhy600, the perfect sweetspot for widefield mosaic. 

Soon after he started his first mosaic project, a wide view of the cygnus region:

At first I was like: "sh*t he got it first..."
But I realised that there was some missed potential in this image (no offense ) 
Bray's approach was to show this region in SHO colors and for most parts of this image it looks really nice! 
There were still alot of regions where beautiful Oiii details and signal was missing, also the dark dustlanes and details that you get from LRGB could be more detailed. 

That's the part where I come in. My love and style is connected to deeply integrated LRGB + Ha and Oiii images, so I made a plan for the future.
At the time of planning phase for such images I was stuck with bad weather in germany, not the best place to do images with hundrets of hours of integration time...

I had to change something! Moving to a new country with better weather? Nah, not a very smart move... Investing some money for a slot on a remote telescope site? Yeah sounds interesting!
Since I'm located in Germany I had to look for the best possible remote solution and the only place for that in my mind was Spain. I started with some research and after a few weeks and a nice coincidence I got in contact with Sophie and Jens , they were planning to move their equipment to Spain aswell and I joined them! 

In February this year (2023) it was finally time:

Bortle 2/3 and more clear nights than I ever had in my life, the door for massive projects just opened for me !

Lets start slow and then go all in, that was the goal for starting my remote life. I did some single panel images to get warm with the setup but soon after I started to build a automated mosaic sequence in N.I.N.A and during a full moon I tested it on this exact mosaic. I got around 30hrs of data and tried to stitch it. Everything worked except for the strong gradients I got from the full moon. 

A few weeks later I started capturing data on the mosaic. I had to wait until the early hours of the morning so that the panels I wanted to capture get above 30 degrees on the horizon.

This is how the mosaic looked in telescopius:

Since my telescope doesnt have a rotator I had/wanted to use a 20% overlap to ensure that I dont get registration and blending problems between the panels!

I first captured most parts of the H-Alpha dataset but then moved between the filters to slowly build up the libary of files.
At the beginning of August I captured the final images for the green channel and started working :^)

While I was coming close to the end of capturing my wanted data I had Bray Falls image in mind again and was like: Why dont we just work together on this? He has a very similar setup to mine, when just looked at raw numbers like focal lengh and resolution.
Shortly after I contacted him and asked if he wanted to provide his old dataset of Ha and Oiii data and he did! This was now a 2 people project which may should have been at the start haha
I certainly wasted the most amount of time on it but his data greatly enhanced my narrowband channels, especially Oiii.

With Brays data we reached the 250hr integration mark, now it was time to process.


This is where the fun and torture begins... 
But first I want to give some basic informations about the dataset:
-over 3000 single .fits files were captured
-over 150gb in RAW data from these .fits files
-RAW resolution of over 1,5 gigapixels
-The processing folder almost reached 500gb (including all the different stacked images/mosaic, different versions for processing stages for each file and filter)
-The final 16bit .PSB file (Large Photoshop Document) has ~7,5gb in size!

I knew that this will happen so I upgraded my PC to a dedicated Gen 4.0 2TB NVMe SSD and 64GB memory to even be able to process all this in max resolution.

For now you have read enough text! Here are some more images during the processing stage:

The processed LRGB image


The processed H-Alpha image


The processed Oiii image