This is a mosaic of the North American and Pelican Nebula's and some of the surrounding area. I knew going into this project that I would end up with over 120 hours of integration time, but this ended up going above 200 hours, and I still could have done more as I had to crop some of the edges more than I wanted to.
In the end, I feel it turned out decently offering both some good resolution when zoomed in and a lower SNR that didnt take much cleanup. In fact the image you see here has no noise reduction. The processing consists of stacking in APP for each sub frame, then a mosaic integration with some LNC to smooth out the gradients between the subs. Next is color combination in APP, then an export to Photoshop for very minimal curves and color adjustments. Overall the post processing is about 10 minutes of work, which I think speaks to the level of integration time and data set.
A higher resolution image (19116 x 17663) can be seen here:
http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/779095dde3a7ee2ea03e898a62503a36And to compare some noise reduction in DeNoise (which I dont think made that much of a difference):
http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/e037f46a39944ac0aabab35df3c44e31Due a few days of bad weather, being out of town for a week, and the large amount of individual frames for this... the project is the work of over 2 months. As fun as it was to accomplish, I will be glad to put up some different targets now.
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