In the last few days I was able to finish my mosaic of the Cygnus region in H-alpha. I used 4 nights for this, partly because of shifting manually the field between exposures (using thesky6 to help me).
The images are made with a Canon 100mm lens @ F2.8, a geoptik adapter and my SXV-H9 camera.
I used the following strategy:
- Thesky6 was used to create a large mosaic with 20% overlap.
- Polar alignment was performed using my EQ6 procedure and aiming at the center of the view with nebulosity.
- Next NGC7000 was centered everytime in the same way and synced to create the same FOV every time.
- Than finefocus came in. This was tough as I only had 25 microns of critical focus zone. I used CCDinspector to check the flatness of the view, as this is the best indicator for good focus.
- Than I made 3x300s exposures for every tile, in total 42 tiles...
Here are the results. I will post the small versions with links to the large ones.
Full resolution panorama (35 megapixels!) (large file!)
Here is an annotated version with the most famous objects:
Full resolution (large file!)
Finally I made an image removing all stars just showing the nebulosity. It gives a 3D feel. I especially like the crescent which is hanging in space ...
Image link
Update: the most recent updated versions can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/avdhoeven/ ... 157713340/