My first mosaic (4 panels), captured over the course of several nights August - September 2023 (from the suburbs outside of Pittsburgh, PA)
Stars are RGB, shot over 2 nights (around new moon).
Nebulosity is narrow-band SHO, shot over 6 nights (closer to full moon).
Each night, I captured just 15 minutes of data per channel, across 3 channels (either SHO or RGB), across all 4 of my mosaic panels. So generally 15 x 3 x 4 = 3 hours per night of data gathering.
Processing in PixInsight followed this general flow:
- Pre-processing:
- WBPP on all of the data at once (using grouping for the nightly sessions)
- Mosaics:
- Created 1 mosaic per channel, for a total of 6 separate mosaics (S, H, O, R, G, B)
- Image solved 1 mosaic (Ha) to get its celestial coordinates
- Star aligned (registered) all 6 mosaics so they matched up
- Copied celestial coordinates from Ha mosaic to remaining 5 mosaics
- RGB:
- RGB combined the 3 RGB mosaics
- Extracted stars (StarXTerminator), discarded the nebulosity
- Performed SPCC color correction on the stars (why I needed celestial coordinates)
- Stretched stars (a bit under-stretched, as I prefer fewer, smaller stars)
- SHO:
- Removed stars from each of the individual SHO mosaics (StarXTerminator)
- Stretched each starless SHO mosaic
- Adjusted color for each SHO mosaic via various masked curves transformations
- PixelMath to combine the 3 individual SHO mosaics together
- Final combined image:
- PixelMath to combine the RGB stars with SHO nebulosity
- NoiseXTerminator
- Dynamic Crop
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