Faint galactic cirrus towards the LMC"Our first Rokinon 135mm mosaic project"
Since we acquired the Rokinon 135mm f2.0 lens, we, as the “Cluster One Observatory” team had in mind an optical configuration that, in combination with our ASI294MC-Pro sensor, would allow us to obtain wide-field images. In fact, this configuration offers an amazing Field-Of-View (FOV) of 8.2 x 5.5 degrees, which is perfect for capturing excellent images of extended areas of the sky. As a matter of fact, some weeks ago we published our first light obtained in the
Small Magellanic Cloud, a perfect target for a single panel with this optical setup.
Even so the large FOV, there are areas of the sky that clearly needs more extended FOV and, to maintain spatial resolution without sacrificing details, the answer is very well known: Mosaics!
And for our first mosaic project with this setup, we have chosen a good old friend: The Large Magellanic Cloud, which we have already mapped intensively using the William Optics SpaceCat 51 telescope and published
here. This time, we decided to map a total of 4 panels.
Another special objective we're aiming out of this project is the detection of the faint and widespread integrated flow nebulae that surround the Magellanic Clouds. In fact, these structures were notably detected in
our image featured as the
“NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)”, on February 11th, 2023.
The observations of this mosaic project were obtained during 10 nights, between November and December 2023, distributed in 3 blocks:
- Block 1
2023-11-13, 2023-11-14
- Block 2
2023-11-22, 2023-11-23, 2023-11-24
- Block 3
2023-12-06, 2023-12-07, 2023-12-08, 2023-12-09, 2023-12-10
The mapping project of the Greater Magellanic Cloud was completed with a total of 518 light frames of 300 seconds each, adding up about 43 hours of effective observing time.
To this time we must add calibrations frames and, in some cases, nights in which data were obtained but, due to weather conditions with some clouds, that data was discarded from the final mosaic.
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Filter. Frames Hours
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UVIR 370 30.8
LeX 148 14.2
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Processing notes:As implied above, this is yet another version of possibly our favorite object to image, and with every iteration, there are more and more things to learn both in the adquisition and processing stages.
This image however is special, as the FOV of the Rokinon 135mm offered us more space to capture some faint galactic cirrus in RGB.
Both images were first processed independently to their max signal-to-noise ratio possible in Pixinsight and they were later merged in Photoshop, where general levels and color adjustements were made and fine tuned.
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https://www.clusteroneobservatory.com/ 
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