Without a doubt, my most ambitious project to date : A 6-panel mosaic of M31.
I set myself a fairly large task. 6 panels of data, each panel with 7 different events - R, G, B, and 4 different Lum exposure times. Just keeping everything organized and arranged for registration and integration was a challenge in and of itself! Of course, handling mosaics is always a challenge, trying to produce a clean result where panels meet, trying to keep SNR relatively consistent between panels, and so on.
I'mn at a chuff-level of 100 over the resolution afforded by my "tiny shard of glass peepscope", which has allowed dozens of tiny faint fuzzies to emerge, and even shows some dust lanes in M110. Honestly, something I never thought I'd capture with an 80mm.
I faced a particular daunting challenge near the end, as a fellow imager
identified some gnarly color gradients at a few panel lines that I just outright could not see. I'm still not sure I got them all, but with some aggressive stretching and oversaturation I believe I was able to at least mitigate them to some degree.
In general, I'm very pleased with the outcome here. The darker skies at the new place continue to contribute to cleaner and easier to work with data, and as an added bonus I seem (yeah yeah, small sample size) to be getting more clear nights as well.
I'm too lazy to enter complete acquisition details for 6 panels, 4 filters, and 4 different exposure times on lum.
So, the basic parameters are :
Acquired 2019-09-05 to 2019-10-05
After weighting and frame rejection (approximate totals per panel)
35 x 180s R, G, B
55ea x 30s, 60s, 120s, and 300s Lum
~ 12 Hrs total integration time per panel, for ~72 hrs total integration time in the image.
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