Another go at the beautiful rosetta nebula. Although this bright emission nebula is 5,200 light years from my house, its still too big, at about 130 light years across to fit in the field of view of my 14" Dobson. So I thought I'd try a mosaic. This is the sort of experimenting I like to do close to a full moon. I figured it would also be a great test for my new L-eXtreme filter. At 11 pm, the 95% moon was directly above the nebula to the South. I used the framing assistant in NINA to generate a 6 panel sequence. I shot 150 x 4 sec (10 mins for each panel). Then stacked them in Sharpcap and used the stretched stack output directly in Microsoft ICE to align and blend the panel. It worked like a charm. I did need to crop out some of the hanging panels, but I was still left with a good chunk of the nebula. You can see the original before cropping in the original image. I brightened and denoised in Lightroom and this is the result. Not too bad. (thanks to Pat Prokop for most of this workflow).(
https://youtu.be/3WXSzwG38U8). Moving forward, I will try reducing the platesolving tolerance to better align the panels. I'd set at 2 arcmins cos the big old Dobson is not that precise. This is my alternative to buying a smaller scope!
Comments