Having learned a bit about how to use things and having captured some very neat stuff, I wanted to try my hand at the larger field without buying another scope. I learned about the mosaic ability as much as I could, and gave it a go tonight.

1. I created the sequence in the sequence editor and saved it.
2. I went to the scheduler and loaded it, no problem.
3. I entered the target (North America Nebula in this case)
4. I chose my equipment profile in the dropdown
5. I added the scheduled job and then clicked on the mosaic editor
6. I set the parameters for my fov, pixel size, resolution, etc (should some of this have populated already from the equipment dropdown selector?)
7. I selected a 2x2 mosaic (656mm focal length tonight) and moved the boxes to where I wanted them for the mosaic.

At this point there were a couple things I noticed.

a) mentioned above, nothing was populated in the boxes in the mosaic setup.
b) the patern layout for the mosaic did not match my astrometry calculated field rotation. Should this auto-populate?
c) possibly because of b, astrometry seems to not point up in the correct direction. I don't have a rotator, but when I went into the options, it
says rotator 30 in the box. I set this to 0 thinking I don't have one, so at best it should be 0. "up" on the astrometry solved FOV seems to have been off for the last few builds. I didn't think too much about it until tonight when it really matters in a mosaic

I start the scheduler

The scope slews to the first location, takes a picture, solves it and attempts to slew to the corrected location based on the calculations. This repeats 10 times, each time seeming to move 1 arc-minute closer (but some times further away!). This fails and play my failure warning sound. It does this a couple times, and then goes on to another tile. This one it hits more accurately, does a couple slews and solves, gets in range (30 arc seconds), grabs a guide star, calibrates, and it is off to the races capturing images (cool) This tile gets done capturing, and it attempts to move to the next one. The same cycle repeats. I have 1 failed tile, and two completed tiles now.

Along with this, on the tiles it is attempting to solve, I have the problem I have mentioned before where the eqmod mount indicator jumps away from the FOV rectangle (picture attached). I had some logs of the slew/solve iterations, but seem to have misplaced them. I wanted to get logs, but I must have missed a setting.

The second pictures is also interesting. After the good tiles, I wanted to go back and grab the ones that had failed. Ekos had shut down, so I started it up again, did a 2 star mount model, and loaded the schedule job from disk. I hit play and it proceeded to slew and solve, and then start capturing at the location in the second picture as if it were happily finding the missing tiles and getting them for me. Something was way off.

I am tired now, so please forgive any typos or ramblings. I will read this again in the morning, and attempt to repeat and get good logs. If there is anything obvious though, please let me know.

Thanks!

As a shutdown step, I manually parked the mount, and then hit the "clear mount model" button on the eqmod mount tab. When I hit the button the eqmod pointer jumped back to where I thought it should be. Perhaps something is messing up my model.

Last night I was able to re-run the sequence that was missing from the night before. I now have all the sets for a 2x2 mosaic! I stacked the individual panes of the set, but now, how to combine them. I looked at montage, the learning curve threw me, so I checked out swarp, but it doesn't seem to want to convert to mono, and didn't seem to stack correctly. I need to play with it more. For those of you that have successfully put together a FITs based mosaic, how did you go about the stitching of images?

Thanks!
Jim

Astropixelprocessor is the best out there for mosaics, brand new and amaaaaazing. Really.

Reason nothing is filled up automatically is because it is an offline planning tool that does not require Ekos to be up and running. I am working on the FOV stuff and there is "Detect from INDI" feature that I haven't implemented yet. I suppose it could be used for this as well sometime in the future if Ekos was online when you started using the Mosaic tool.

@knro - thank, didn't realize it was not part of it. Makes sense then.

@supernov - I spent the afternoon playing with the trial version of AstroPixelProcessor. I have to say it is a pretty complete stacking solution.

I figured out how to do the mosaics now, so here is the result of my 4 panel/2 night attempt at the North America nebula. I think it would have gone better if I had done it all on the same night, and added more panels to the mosaic itself. I still see the potential here, both for mosaic capture with Ekos and the mosaic creator, and with APP.

Thanks to you both!

Awesome, you have to realise a mosaic like this took days with other tools until APP was developed.

Looks great to me! Are you using Stellarmate/EKOS and would you be willing to share your mosaic files capture routines. Rather than me relearning what you have just done.

Thanks.

PS struggling to get a picture with Stellarmate at the moment.

That post was some time ago, and I no longer have those files. I have taken a few more mosaics after that, but not for a year or two now as I am working to complete my Messier catalog (only about 10 to go!).

Here is a 2 panel mosaic of the California nebula in Hydrogen-alpha though.



Jim

pixinsight is pretty good at combining many images into a mosaic.

I have used it a few times in the past. see below

I am in the process of rewriting part of the mosaic tool to allow for a smoother procedure. There is a thread on invent.kde.org that I used as a base for this improvement.

-Eric