I have been trying to create wide-field (100 sq square degree+) mosaics for some time now. Although I have had some success, I am a little surprised by the lack of any good, easy tools in the various software suites. Particularly when compared to software in other areas; deconvolution, noise reduction, star reduction, gradient removal etc, etc.
For the ABC survey @James Tickner is writing a purpose built pakage for a mosaic of 500+ fields over the southern sky, but I thought I would check first just to see if there is something that we have missed.
My software writing experience is more than 30 years old, so I have to use ready-made tools. To date, I have found the best/easiest success with the mosaic mode in APP, it only works for up to 20 fields or so. It also fails for vert large areas, or areas near the pole. It is also a little bit of a “black box” so it can be difficult to tell what is going on, particularly with the astrometric solution.
PixInsight MosaicByCoordinates is extremely good, but the sister routine of PhotometricMosaic is rather cumbersome, only working a pair of fields at a time. It also doesn’t work well when the fields are rotated in xy with respect to one another, so it starts to fail with larger areas nearer the poles.
GradientMergeMosaic is just not very good.
Other more commercial packages are great eg PTGui, but really only work with stretched images - at which point frame-to-frame border matching becomes problematic.
What do others use out there. Any advice or tips?
