DROGENBERG

Or actually maybe more still a foetus, as the Soul nebula is often seen as a foetus or a little bear. Imagination! I’ve never seen a Soul in it: how does a soul look like anyhow?

The frames were taken last week Tuesday, in horrible conditions: high clouds, fog, and tons of moisture. Frames were whitened out by the fog, and all street lighting reflecting on the fog.

The image is a mosaic, about 6000×7400 pixels. More then 7 panels were composed with APP to create it. However, due to the fog, soo many gradients were present, I really had to get all tricks out of my sleeves to get a decent picture. It was processed with all parameters in APP at max (Normalisation, blending) and also cropped the outer edges which could not be salvaged. Material used was: Nikon D750, no filters, EQ8; Esprit120, 400mm guidelens with an ASI290MM

Also to be seen at Astrobin

After creating the Heart nebula in a mosaic a month ago, we had some semi-clear nights last week, in which I could try and stitch the Soul nebula to the Heart.

Unfortunbately these nights were also very foggy, sometimes fog banks floated over, with barely star visibility. The good news is that SGP (Sequence Generator Pro) kept up trying, despite star loss in PHD, to continue making lights. While sleeping. So that’s really wonderfull.

The end result, needless to say, did have that much gradient sin the final image that I do not consider it a result. It’s more an exercise. The final mosaic had 10.000×12.000 pixels and took 1,5 Gb TIFF or FITS size. Both AstroPixelProcessor and Photoshop had issues digesting this large file. In fact it’s so large that Astrobin or this website cannot upload it.

Posts

25 December 2019: a Christmas baby

Attempt to mosaic