ZWO ASI294 Color Camera - Mosaic Attempts

Introduction | Mosaics | Final Words | Links

Archive

On this page I present two simple mosaics, which I put together from photos that I took with my ZWO ASI294MC camera. For this purpose, I had the photos evaluated and labeled by nova.astrometry.net, so that it is easier to find your way around, because the objects are very small due to the large field of view.

The whole thing is more for fun; I wanted to find out how the galaxies are distributed in the "greater Virgo area". See also:

ZWO ASI294 Color Camera - Information Archive
ZWO ASI294 Color Camera - Galaxies Archive
ZWO ASI294 Color Camera - Mosaic Attempts Archive

Note: Unfortunately, I only used my ZWO ASI294MC camera very little because I kept using my electronic telescopes. So I sold the camera again at the end of November 2024, even though I had not really explored its potential yet.

Introduction

From April to June is "galaxy time", and so I photograph and observe more galaxies during this time. With the eVscope, this means that because of the small field of view (about the size of the moon), I generally catch only one galaxy on a photo; only in exceptional cases there can be more. Since acquiring the ZWO ASI294, however, I can photograph larger fields of view; with the PS 72/432 refractor, for example, I get a field of view of a about 2.5° x 1.7° - the largest FOV that I can achieve with my equipment.

In creating the mosaics, I did not put much effort into it. I did not adjust the brightness of the individual photos, which are not the original photos, but versions that were labelled by the Website nova.astrometry.net, and I only roughly overlapped them (using layers in Adobe Photoshop Elements). I was more concerned with the position of the objects than with the "beauty" of the mosaic. With larger mosaics, the photos may have to be rotated a bit, and then the overlapping does not work well anyway.

It should be noted that I took the stacked photos with the StellarMate astronomy computer in control, the live stacking of which is still plagued with a lot of problems, especially regarding image quality. In addition, the image width is scaled down to 1920 pixels, which further reduces image quality.

Mosaics

From M 84 to M 58

The following mosaic is built from three photos. The photos did not need to be rotated.

From M 84 to M 60

The following mosaic consists of four photos; the first three are those of the previous mosaic. The fourth photo had to be rotated and therefore does not fit well.

This photo roughly corresponds to the central area of the E14+ page in the latest issue of Karkoschka's book Atlas für Himmelsbeobachter.

Final Words

My very first impression is that I should highlight Messier objects in particular to make orientation easier.

Here are versions with markers for the Messier objects: From M 84 to M 58 - From M 84 to M 60