California to the Pleiades and Beyond (Chris Parfett)

California to the Pleiades and Beyond

This was my first time to attempt a mosaic. The initial plan was to start out with 4 panels and see how things went. I used Telescopius to lay out the plan with a 20% overlap and put the CSV the site gave me into the ASI AIR plan mode. I was going to be content with just 4 panels going from NGC 1499 to M45 to test the waters. The lens was stopped down to f 2.8 for this project.

The original plan:

I was pretty happy with a fairly inexpensive mount doing everything it was supposed to do and the first 4 panels all came together well. I then decided to add 2 lower panels to include some of the TMC. I did NGC 1333 and the California Nebula as stand-alone projects to test the lens before this project. This ended up being a big help as I could add a bit more to the top of this image to give the California Nebula a bit more breathing room because after the crop I was really close to it. In a way this kind of ended being 8 panels, but the 2 at the top used maybe like 1/8 or less of the field per panel. All of the field work came together fairly well thanks to the aid of the website and the ASI Air.

One of the two earlier images taken during lens testing to add to the top of the image:
Found here: https://www.astrobin.com/oxbgao/

Then off to Pixinsight and this is where things became more challenging! I started by doing a DBE on each panel and then used the script Mosaic By Coordinates. After that it was to Gradient Merge Mosaic. I used combine type: average and shirk radius of 5. (If anyone that has read this and would care to share a better way or different parameters for GMM please do so as it would be very much appreciated!) When that was done I found it to be a decent outcome, but not as good as I had hoped. I had black empty holes along some of the edges and some stars that were misaligned. I had to do a couple more background extractions as well because once all the panels went together you could see different gradients in each one (I’m assuming from being shot in different areas of the sky on different nights). I’m not sure if I should have done the original DBE on each panel to start out with or done it after they were all together?

After some extra work in order to fix the issues, this is the final result and I am overall pleased with the outcome of this image. I’m waiting on an Antlia ALP-T high speed to get here that has been on B.O. for some time now. I know there is Ha throughout this region, but that is maybe a next year project to add to this. I think that this lens will shine in mosaic work and I will continue to do so going forward.

Click and zoom is not available due the JPEG being roughly 30MB.

Data from home.

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

	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

	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

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	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8842221
PixInsight job	8R4FSXIQKMLO7WBHSZ2TJ5BG3JXQ0OY0
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	03h59m44s.68
RA (top/left)	04h08m00s.77
RA (top/right)	03h08m54s.70
RA (bottom/right)	03h53m09s.70
RA (bottom/left)	04h47m57s.84

Dec (center)	+29°26′21″.4
Dec (top/left)	+40°31′19″.3
Dec (top/right)	+31°48′05″.4
Dec (bottom/right)	+18°19′58″.2
Dec (bottom/left)	+25°55′03″.7

Image Index:

Contribution Index (beta):