And a re-do from the stage of assembling the mosaic (~ same as the workflow from the integration of all the subs in a regular non-mosiac capture). Explained a bit more in comments below.
The photographer is looking for generalized feedback about the aesthetic and technical qualities of their image.
Description
Since the comet’s arrival I’ve been off in never-never land again, and have mastered some neglected issues with PixInsight. This is a mosaic of 2 panes overlapping about 35%, as it is a little too crowded in the FOV of my rig, which is 640mm equivalent. The need to shoot two panes cuts into integration time, and this was only about 2.5 hours for each pane. (That’s important for this stuff since the ability to pull out faint detail is proportional to the number of photons collected.)
Viewed at 100% there are a couple of bad areas where I was not careful enough with a couple of the “development” processes after the mosaic was assembled. I’ll redo it soon but for now I’m tossing it into the ring, and hoping to spend more time back here.
Specific Feedback
All comments welcome. I think my favorite thing about an optical train dedicated to astrophotography is the ability to bring out different star sizes.
Technical Details
My astro rig, a mosaic of 2 panes to give about 500mm equivalent FOV. Processed solely in PixInsight. If anyone wants details, I have about 18 pages of processing notes and maybe 12 for the shooting cribsheet.
Critique Template
Use of the template is optional, but it can help spark ideas.
Wow - this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to use the Mind Blown emoji. I certainly can’t tell where the bad areas are. This is just amazing!
Thanks, @Youssef_Ismail and @Bonnie_Lampley. I redid it hoping to fix a couple of very small areas, which hardly made any difference, but I was astonished to see that the stars are now aligned differently (and obviously properly). I couldn’t figure out why the small blue nebula on the left side didn’t have a star associated with it – and now it does. The stars were removed at one step to allow more extreme stretching of the starless nebula structure (think controlled contrast) then put right back in. I can’t imagine what might have changed their alignment on the previous try, but something did. I suspect a bug of some sort. (I redid the exact same steps except for the quite variable contrast adjustments.)
Anyhow they fit much better now. I left the crop a little different as I like the smaller strand of nebulosity at the bottom. And tonal and color adjustments didn’t quite match. They never will, with so much leeway in bringing out detail.
The stars are removed in the linear stage and the starless nebula is tonally manipulated in the step that stretches it to nonlinear. So the stars also need to be stretched, and they came out a little different this time, with the leeway in the process I’m using. It’s not easy to visualize how they will look after recombining and any final manipulations.
Thanks, @Keith_Lisk – and thanks for the heads up about the Masters of PixInsight tutorials! I finally found time to watch this last one on the Pleiades and it was well done and informative. I’m hoping for decent skies to shoot it again soon but will go back to last year’s shoot (and several others) and see if I can improve it a bit.
I’m still scratching my head about the misaligned stars, but at least now I know to be more observant.
