During this past years, I’ve made a few mosaics and with experience I noticed that it’s better to rotate through panels during the acquisition than making a entire panel in one night, then another panel the other night, etc.
The goal is to average the noise in order to make the processing easier, and create a seamless mosaic.
I’m using the frame and mosaic module, which is a super tool to create mosaic.
I think that having the possibility to rotate through targets (in this example through panels) during one session after x subframes would be a very nice feature to make mosaics.
For example, make 3 Ha subframes for the panel 1, then 3 for the panel 2, and so on, then return to panel 1 and do again 3 Ha subframes, etc.
So far I’m duplicating the targets to have this same effect, but it’s very long and painful with big mosaics (it takes time to create this very long sequence, and each panel is divided in multiple target names for each duplication).
that would be nice. what i have been doing is just manually moving the targets each night to achieve the rotation. i am “only” working with 9 panels so it’s feasible for me. but some kind of target-level rotation would make this easier.
I have to add my vote to this as well. I started trying to do mosaics last year, and quickly learned the necessity of cycling through panels to maintain the consistency of the data so merging was seamless. I’ve mostly worked with 6-panel mosaics, although have tried 9-panel. I have been unable to complete any of them so far due to limited clear sky time, and partly due to the fact that once I got to the last panel, sky conditions often had changed so much it was so difficult to balance the noise and sky levels that I ultimately gave up.
Would be AWESOME to have the ability to set up some kind of cycle mechanism that would allow us to cycle through PART of the imaging sequence for each panel, then cycle through the panels. I wonder if something akin to the Dither every N frames might work for mosaics…cycle every N frames. I’m an ASI1600 user an a short exposure guy, so rather than 3 subs per panel, I’d probably do 90s exposures and acquire 10 or 20 per channel for each channel configured in the sequence, then cycle to the next panel, repeat the sequence, then cycle to the next panel, etc. etc. I may acquire 100, 150, 200 subs per channel in total, which would cycle through the panels 10-20 times.
If you’re using PixInsight to process your mosaic, it is important to use the script “dnaLinearFit” prior to combining the panels. This will eliminate some of the issues you’re facing.
I can make good mosaics, with all the processing tools, I know how to do this, the condition is that data has similar acquisition conditions, and this is the issue we have very few nights where conditions are comparable …
I would like to add my support for target rotation as well. So far, all of the mosaics I have done have uncorrectable issues between panels due to the often wildly differing transparency night to night here in
Colorado.
Same reasons…I have found that conditions often differ enough one night to the next that creating mosaics is all but impossible unless I manually adjust my targets to duplicate each panel N times, then split the total sub count across the duplicates. I’ll grab say 6 frames (1 hour) on each panel, then go back to the first and grab 6 more on each panel, etc. etc. It is very tedious to reconfigure a mosaic sequence this way, since I’ll often have to manually duplicate each panel 4-6 times in order to get enough data on each panel each night so as to distribute the varying sky conditions across all panels. So I don’t do mosaics much…but it is something I really want to do.
Me too, I do mosaics as well and having a way to rotate through targets with a predefined number of subs per target before switching would be much appreciated!
This would be a great feature for making mosaic, because it would solve the problem with gradients in different mosaic pictures when putting them all together!!!
Please for the love of god look into this feature more. Mosaics are a massive pain especially the more panels you have due to having to spread out filters and panels during a single night and across multiple nights to get a smooth consistent image once stitched together. This request has been here for 5 years now and would make imaging mosaics a lot easier.