Successful Mosaic with NAS

I've attempted Mosaic's before but my processing was challenged and I could never get more than a two star mosaic completed, and even then I wasn't super happy with the results. Then a video popped up on my YouTube feed from AstroTard about making a mosaic. His approach completely changed it and seemed to make it a more scientific mosaic because you used plate solving to orient the images vs trying to let PixInsight match the starts based on pixels. I did some trials on some old mosaics I had and the results were way better than before.

So instead of reprocessing my old mosaic files I decided to tackle an 8 Panel mosaic that included the Orion Nebula, the Running Man Nebula, The Horsehead Nebula and the Flame Nebula... sure I could start small but why. I set the RASA 8 up with the ASI294MC Pro and layed out the panels in N.I.N.A. I found that saving the sequences was super huge because of how many different nights I had to image to get the entire target. I think I set up the images to capture 120 x 30s images of each panel and let it get as many done each night and just continue the next night. After about 4 nights of captures I had all the data... which is a lot of data at 22MBs per image and started processing it.

Luckily the new weighted batch processing in Pixinsight makes it super easy to go from raw to integrated files. And then adding dither to each of the 8 panels the file sizes continued to grow. By the time I did my final dithered mosaic I think the raw tif was close to 800 MB. All this storage would not have been possible if I didn't use my Network Attached Storage (NAS) from Synology. Its fast enough that I can save the image directly to the NAS from NINA and be processing the previous panels imagery at the same time. I have pretty fast WiFi (300Mbps local transfer) at the house so that helped a lot too.

Overall I'm pretty happy with the results of the Mosaic, and I even think the panel that included the Horsehead nebula is better than my first attempt. There is a little color variation in the Orion Nebula which I think is moon glow but still for a first attempt at such a massive project I'm pretty happy.

Blue Water & Dark Skys