Mosaics

[kkoppert]

I am trying to create a Mosaic of the region around Alnitak ngc2024 and the horsehead nebula from 35x22 arcsec individual parts. This requires about 8 parts. I am using staralignment and GradientMergeMosaic. As far as my understanding goes I can combine 2 parts using staralignment and register/match seperate so to combine 8 parts I need to combine 2 frames the 2 of the results to get 4 frames the 2 of these to get 8, however each iteration results in a muddier appearance. Other than usin Microsoft ICE is there a better way?

[chris.bailey]

What do you mean by "muddier". I have done up to 6x4 mosaics and as long as there is sufficient overlap, I do the same as you i.e. creating frame pairs and then pairs of pairs etc. Have you enabled frame adaptation, 2-d surface spline and distortion correction in star alignment? You may have to increase iterations in distortion correction as you add frame pairs together.

Chris

ICE is great for Moon and Solar mosaics but PI beats it hands down for deep sky mosaics.

[kkoppert]

Yes I don't know what I mean by muddier just that the colours seem less intense. I suspect that the screentransferfunction is revealing more at the whitepoint end. Actually I totally disagree with you about ICE, it works well on this region of Orion and is much simpler to use. GradientMergeMosaic seems to be obsessed with stellar warps near the boundary of frames.

[Juan Conejero]

Then please go ahead and use it. Just don't tell or show us anything about it here, as we have zero interest. This is PixInsight Forum.