Mosaics
My field of view was too small to fit in the open cluster Pleiades (Messier 45).
The solution was to build a mosaic of four tiles.
Total exposure: 4hrs 40mins.
224x75 with RGB filters
Here are my four test shots that I combined to figure out the placing of the mosaic tiles. This was quite fiddly because the rotation of the camera was critical. My tip here is to make sure they overlap by around 20% to allow for error - you can see the overlaps in the test. The last thing you want is disjointed panels creating a black hole in the middle of your mosaic. It would be similar to one of those black holes in space… there’s no way back from it.
Pleiades, also known as ‘The Seven Sisters’ is beautiful and jewel-like. The first person to look at it through a telescope and record what he saw was Galileo. He published a sketch of iwhat he saw in a book called Siderius Nuncius, meaning ‘Starry Messenger’. I like to believe that when he first saw Pleiades through his eyepiece he shouted ‘caspita!’ meaning ‘wow!’ which is what I said.
This image of Markarian’s Chain - a cascading set of galaxies - was a four panel mosaic…
The image below was a mosaic where the wide shot was at 37mm focal length and the centre section was shot at 61mm, both with a DSLR camera. Some extra detail was added that was shot with a 740mm focal length telescope.
Details from the above image…
