Let me introduce you to my most ambitious project so far: a 2x2 panels mosaic of the Orion constellation, the result of 7 days of shooting.
Six of these days were done from a Bortle 9 sky with SQM between 16 and 17.5, while the last day I was lucky enough to shoot from a Bortle 4 sky with SQM of 20.8.
During the processing I had to face various problems, such as the reflections caused by bright stars out of the field (for example Rigel in the panel of M42) and the trails of geostationary satellites.
Thanks to the use of the Antlia Triband RGB Ultra Filter I was able to extract a lot of red from the dust without losing too much dark nebulae.
The project required over 800 shots at different exposures (from 2 to 300 seconds) depending on the panel and the location.
I assembled everything with Pixinsight, with some pros and cons. The main drawback was that 70% of the photos taken from home (Bortle 9) were automatically discarded by the program. I had to try many rejection parameters before choosing the one that gave me the most valid results.
I am not completely satisfied with the outcome, but for being my first multi-day project I think I did a good job taking into consideration that I shot from the worst possible location.
Fun fact from 40GB of raw data, Pixinsight generated over 600GB of files 🫠and required about 4h to complete processing with my i9 13900k
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