IMO the 'heart' looks more like a chode with huge balls
This is my most ambitious astrophotography project yet, coming in at over 110 hours 18 minutes of total exposure time (albeit across 12 panels), beating out my previous record of 101 hours on the Elephant Trunk Nebula
The 12 panel mosaic ended up being 518 megapixels in size after cropping, and was an absolute bitch to process. probably never gonna do a mosaic this big again unless I have some quantum supercomputer. I don't have any way to reliably host this on my flickr page, so the image you're seeing is a 2X downsample.
Captured over 35 nights from October 2022 through March 2023, from my Bortle 8 apartment balcony
could only do 4 hours max per night thanks to my wonderful horizons from the balcony overhang
DrizzleIntegration (2x, Var β=1.5) per panel per channel
Creating the mosaic:
I had numerous other attempts to make this using microsoft ICE and mosaicbycoordinates/photometricmosaic, but they all refused to work that well. During this process I found out that the .tiff file format has a max size of around 530 megapixels
StarGenerator to generate a starfield of the region at the same image scale as my drizzled images
StarAlignment to align each drizzled stack to the synthetic starfield
despite reading all the documentation and tinkering with every setting, my blue stars channel for panel 11 refused to align properly with any of the other channels, so the stars here are a bit mismatched
GradientMergeMosaic to combine these aligned panels into the master stacks
DynamicCrop away the edges of each master
Narrowband Linear:
DynamicBackground Extraction
duplicated each image and removed stars via StarXterminator. Ran DBE with a shitload of points to generate background model. model subtracted from original pic using the following PixelMath (thanks, /u/jimmythechicken1!)
$T * med(model) / model
BlurXTerminator
StarXterminator to completely remove stars (narrowband images will be starless processed for almost the rest of the workflow)
NoiseXterminator
HistogramTransformations to bring nonlinear
More agressive stretch for Oiii and Sii
RGB Linear:
ChannelCombination to combine R G and B masters into a color image
SpectrophotometricColorCalibration
HSV Repair
StarXterminator to make a stars only image (this stars only image to be used going forward)
AcrsinhStretch + HistogramTransformation to stretch nonlinear
Nonlinear:
did this over the course of a couple weeks/processing breaks so the details aren't exact
PixelMath to combine stretched narrowband masters into color image
SHO --> RGB (classic Hubble Palette)
HistogramTransformations to adjust channel intensities