✨ My Most Ambitious Project So Far

This is a 30-panel mosaic with around 180 hours of exposure, captured over ~40 nights under the skies of Namibia!

It combines some very interesting regions:
• the Blue Horsehead Nebula, with its soft blue reflection dust glowing around Nu Scorpii
• the Rho Ophiuchi Cloud Complex, one of the most colorful areas of the entire Milky Way
• and on the left, the beautiful red Hα emission regions (Sh2-7 and Sh2-1), adding a striking contrast of ionized hydrogen against the cooler dust clouds

What made this project truly overwhelming was the scale. The unedited master contains about 1.2 million stars and the file sizes were almost too big for my RAM. At times it felt like stitching together a cosmic tapestry, panel by panel, dust lane by dust lane… and hoping it would all line up in the end. Which it did after a lot of tries with different Mosaic-Stitching tools (APP turned out best) and Gradient-Removal tools (GraXpert, DBE, GradientCorrection-Script, MGC).

Very Grateful to Martin Pugh for the rental service in Namibia!

Some interesting crops:

“The Main Three”:
📷 V1_RGB_htInit_7_NR_darker_V2_croppedBottom_q5.jpg
Rho:
📷 V1_RGB_htInit_7_NR_darker_V2_croppedRho_q5.jpg

Sh2-7 and Sh2-9:
📷 V1_RGB_htInit_7_NR_darker_V2_croppedDustRed_q5.jpg
Blue Horsehead:
📷 V1_RGB_htInit_7_NR_darker_V2_blueHorsehead_q5.jpg