Eastern Veil Mosaic

Astro Pixel Processor (APP) has a powerful tool for creating mosaics. Last night I tested it out. The result is stunning:

My camera has a small field-of-view. It cannot fit the entire nebula in one shot. It must be broken up into two panels. Here is a screenshot of my planetarium software C2A. I used it to plan where to position the telescope. The two overlapping red rectangles indicate the framing. As shown there must be some overlap in order for APP to do its magic:

Each panel consists of 50 individual images using a 73-second exposure. The first step in creating the mosaic is to stack those 50 images to create the upper panel:

Followed by the lower panel:

By the way you may have noticed when you enlarge each image that the stars look square. That was due to the choice I made to capture each image using 2×2 binning, essentially reducing each 2×2 matrix of pixels to one pixel. I did that to boost the signal-to-noise ratio at the cost of resolution. The luminance filter was used for all images, no narrowband.

This summer and fall I plan to create a 15-panel color mosaic of the Andromeda Galaxy.