Mosaic madness part 2

Well is it worth it? 

Another frustrating session taking a mosaic of the Rosette Nebula. I thought I had solved the issue of the frames not lining up but once it was all connected to my mount nothing lined up again so its back to the drawing board I guess but I decided to line the mosaic frames up manually which at least got me enough frames to stack them and have something to try out.

Only ten images for each of the four frames which were 50 secs long and an ISO 16000. This gave me enough to work with but with no guiding in place, longer exposures are not going to happen. The other big problem you face when doing this with a DSLR is the gradients you get on the edge of your frames and also how to process them all. 

When I put them together I got the following which is very hard to process successfully so I must conclude that yes this can be done if you are willing to work hard at your processing and stitching the images together but overall my feeling is its not worth the hassle unless you're using a very good camera that gives you nice clean images with no gradients and noise to deal with.

As for the problem of the mosaic frames not lining up I might try and solve that later on or just stick to single images while using a DSLR for the time being.

                          Individual frames put side by side then processed as one image

Images lined up and processed further

Image cropped down to size but the problem of the edges and gradients which is normal in single images becomes much more of a problem when stitched together.

So in conclusion

 You can do it but if your single frames are not very clean and gradients are large on your edges it is going to be very hard to get a good final image even with a large overlap on your frames.

I have done this before on several subjects but it has never been easy to do but with guiding in place and longer exposure times the frames are a bit better with more detail and this helps to match them up.

But for now, I think I will stick with single images or invest in another telescope for a wider field.