Project 49’ was the name code for our second project with the ‘Altaïr of Atlas Astrophotographers’ team, an idea that looked a bit crazy on paper, but that we knew could only be achieved under optimum conditions… The idea was to produce an ultra-detailed image of the Rho Ophiuchi complex, as well as some of its neighbours in the Scorpius constellation, using remotely our setup in Morocco. As this region is about 15° higher in the sky than our home in France, this dream became a reality ! With our instrument in place in the Atlas Mountains, we had to make a 7*7 mosaic (49 tiles), to achieve our goal. A project of this kind already takes up a huge amount of time and material resources (post-processing), so we set ourselves the challenge of producing all our tiles in a single exposure for each filter, without any stacking, and all in LHaRGB using a monochrome camera.
As this type of image is not very common, here are a few figures :
– The total radius of field of the final image is more than 10 degrees
– The total resolution of the image is 900MPx
– The size of the final cropped image is 37000px*24500px
– It took 8 nights to create all the tiles under each filter (approx. 2 hours per night).
– The size of the mosaic once in colour is 6 GB
– The total processing time between computer calculations and aesthetic modifications is around 60 hours
It took a lot of effort and preparation before we could successfully complete this mosaïc on the first try. This project, which started out as a simple test, has shown us that we can take our process even further in the future to achieve even more ambitious projects…
Only a Bortle 1 sky, such as this one at an altitude of 2800m at the observatory, allows so much signal of a single exposure. As this complex is very close to the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, the area is particularly active and the number of stars and galaxies in the background is impressive.
EXIF and details :
– L : 49*300s
– R/G/B : 49*120s for each filter
– Ha : 49*300s
– Total : 13h04
– Takahashi FSQ85EDX
– Player One Poseidon-M
– Pixinsight & Photoshop
– Bortle 1
Astrobin : https://www.astrobin.com/tzvqlb/