The Great Lacerta Nebula mosaic- new CMOS-Data available

[Rouven Asmußen]

Hi everyone,

some of you probably know me by name because of my image postings in the gallery. I would like to take this opportunity to briefly introduce myself. I'm Rouven, 49 years old and I live with my wife and our two children in northern Germany near Hamburg.
I started with astrophotography about 4-5 years ago. At first I only took widefield images of the Milky Way, for which I snuck out of the house at night so as not to wake up my family 🙂  I then quickly bought my first Newtonian telescope and other equipment so that I could also photograph DSO's. Unfortunately, the weather in northern Germany is not kind to me and I only have a few opportunities a year to pursue this great hobby. When it is clear, the moon usually gets in the way or it's summer, when we don't really have a night phase up here in the north. 
Once I got to grips with my equipment, I also wanted to improve my image processing skills. Also because I had been working mainly with AstroPixelProcessor at the time and wanted to start using PixInsight. Therefore, in addition to my rather few images per year, I was looking for a way to edit other data sets. That's how I came across with TelescopeLive. I think it's a great way to improve your own skills and learn from others. Not only by editing your own images but also by being able to see what results others are achieving with the same dataset. It's a great way to recognise what you could have done better by yourself. And last but not least through the newly created forum here on TelescopeLive, where you can exchange with each other on almost all areas of astrophotography.

And that is also the reason for my first post here. A few days ago, I uploaded a 2-panel mosaic of the Great Lacerta Nebula to the gallery. Although the two new data sets with the CMOS camera have been available for a few weeks now, I'm the only one who has edited or uploaded the image so far. I was wondering why this is the case, because otherwise you can always marvel several versions quite quickly? Is the object uninteresting or are there problems with the image processing? 
When it comes to creating a mosaic, there is a lot of help online. For example, Adam Block has a very good video here on TelescopeLive on this topic for PixInsight users: 
https://telescope.live/tutorials/mosaic-mastery-delving-deep-pixinsights-photometric-tool.
Another video which I can recommend is by Tim Hutchison and is available here:

For APP I only know of one very good video in German by Frank Sackenheim, but I think Scotty and Nik have also provided very good content on this topic in the tutorial section here on TelescopeLive. 

I would also be interested to know if anyone has ever tried to create a DSO mosaic with the Photomerge tool in Photoshop? I've only tried it on a solar mosaic so far and was surprised by the very good result. It produced a perfect image straight away.
I would be very happy if one or the other would give feedback on my questions! And of course I would also be delighted to receive opinions and criticism of my picture. 

[Jarmo Ruuth]

I usually do mosaics in Photoshop. I use Edit/Auto-Align Layers and Edit/Auto-Blend Layers. First I have edited individual panels in PixInsight. In most cases Photoshop creates an image that I find to be good enough for me. If I run into problems sometimes I have used the PixInsight mosaics tools. But PixInsight mosaics tools are very complicated so I have not done it many times.

Great image! And thanks for the remainder, downloading Great Lacerta Mosaic panels right now 🙂.

Jarmo
 

[Rouven Asmußen]

Thanks Jarmo! 
I'm looking forward to your version with the CMOS data. Your last processing with the CCD data is the reason why I became aware of this object. That was an impressive image and rightly APOD!

[Jarmo Ruuth]

I have some trouble with this SPA-1 data set as there is a strong vignette like effect in the FITS files. When I do a mosaic it is of course visible also there.

Was there a solution to this problem? If I calibrate images myself would that help? I can of course crop but I was wondering if there is a better solution.

Image below shows the problem. In the image I have used just a subset of the data.

 

 

Edited December 16, 2023 by Jarmo Ruuth

[Rouven Asmußen]

I think I was able to reduce the vignette with the help of Graxpert AI so that I had to crop less. I did the fine-tuning using the Trim Mosaic Tiles script. 

[Jarmo Ruuth]

I tried to calibrate the data myself and there was no big difference in calibrated frames. I guess that was the expected result but I just wanted to check it.