Back in mid-March, and after a few months of scope and filter issues, I had just about reached the end of my tether when it came to poor QC from non-premium astro products. As a result, I ended up putting a pre-order in for an LZOS 105/650, with a waiting time of ~4 months, and a couple of Chroma NB filters.

To tide me over in the mean time, I set up my Samyang 135mm f/2 lens and QHY268M for some widefield imaging. However, being in the middle of galaxy season meant there wasn't much to shoot, especially from my moderately light polluted back garden. One clear night, for a bit of fun, I set up my sequencer to start taking subs on NGC7000 when it rose at around 2am, not expecting to see much at only ~15 degrees altitude. I focused the lens and went to bed without particularly high hopes.

I woke up the next morning to see that my plate solver had failed, and the framing was a couple of degrees out. From the first few subs it was clear that this was because the target was partially behind a tree, and didn't rise above it until around 20 degrees altitude. The sequencer had continued through this failure though, and taken subs throughout the night with the odd framing. The later subs looked good, and I stacked them on a whim to see what was visible. I was impressed with what I saw, but unfortunately the framing had left me with an unusual field of view where the pelican nebula had been chopped in half.

After some deliberation, I decided to look at it as an opportunity rather than a setback, and aimed to expand the FoV by producing a two panel mosaic. The next clear night gave better results, with my plate solving issue resolved, and I managed to stitch the panels together without too much trouble. However, the resulting framing left a bit to be desired, with a strange aspect ratio, and not much going on in the right hand panel. I took to the Digitised Sky Survey to see what else was around, and discovered was that I was missing out a lot of interesting structure in NW Cygnus that I could fit in with a three panel mosaic. I also saw that I could fit in the crescent and tulip with a 3x2 mosaic... You know where this goes ;)

At the start of all this I only had an Sii filter, with Ha and Oiii waiting for production. A long lead time on these two filters, coupled with an amazing run of clear skies in April meant that I ended up capturing 3-4 hours each on eight (!) panels in Sulphur before I got the chance to dedicate some time to the other channels. As those of you who have done it know, working with an eight panel mosaic is no mean feat, and my computer struggled a lot when trying to process the data. At many points I felt like I had bitten off more than I could chew, but persevered regardless. That eight panel mosaic is currently sitting on my hard drive awaiting some Ha and Oiii data to combine it with.

In light of the imaging time required, and the huge processing overhead, I ended up settling for a three panel mosaic with the potential to capture more, weather permitting. Once my Ha and Oiii filters came in, I focused on those channels, and despite the nights getting shorter and shorter, I managed to capture 3-4 hours per channel in each of the three panels. With the current forecast, it doesn't look like I'll be getting any more data before astro-dark is up for the season, so I sat down and started to process what I had.

I did four full processes from scratch on this data before ending up with something I was happy with. Even now there are things I'd like to improve about the image, such as a way to incorporate more Oiii into the luminance; there is a large SNR in the right hand panel that I'd like to highlight a little better if possible, and some small PNs that could stand out more. Regardless, I'm very happy with the result and am going to call it finished, at least for now. Maybe after the summer or next year I will return to this and expand it to cover the full 8 panels in all three channels.

The final (for now) image is as follows, and represents a 33% downsample on the full resolution mosaic.

Total integration time is approximately 36 hours, with ~12 hours per channel, split evenly among the three panels.

All data was captured with a QHY268M and Samyang 135mm f/2, riding on my CEM40.

Colour palette used was from thecoldestnights.com , with some tweaks.

Pre-processed in PixInsight, panels stitched in APP, and post-processing in PixInsight and Adobe Lightroom.