This is a 20-frame mosaic, and one of my most ambitious projects. The exposures were taken during the 12 nights between Feb 1 and Feb 12 this year in Western Australia. Previously I uploaded a few LMC pictures from this trip, taken with various optics from 85mm to 500mm focal lengths. All these previous pictures were meant to provide registration reference and gradient removal reference for this final large mosaic.
The regular RGB exposures have a total integration of 18.08 hr. Each of the 20 mosaic panels contains 50 minutes of integration, with the Tarantula region having substantially more integration to enhance S/N.
The H-alpha exposures were made as a 20-frame mosaic using the same optical setup as the RGB exposures, plus a 12-frame mosaic using the focal reducer instead of the flattener. The distribution of exposure is relatively even in the H-alpha case.
The original image has 1.01 giga pixels. The one uploaded here is a 1/4 reduction, to avoid overwhelmingly large file size. To see a higher-resolution image, you may take a look at this Gigapan one:
http://www.gigapan.com/embeds/cvqQTtTFEvk/which is a 2/3 reduction.
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