Problems with creating a mosaic 🙁

@jkbsahner Hi Jakob, for mosaics a few tweaks to the settings used by you are necessary. First of all, you may need to increase the number of stars to 2500 or more. In tab 5 you need to use advanced mode. Please give that a try and let us know if it helped.

Also set normalization mode (tab 5) to advanced. Maybe, but test the suggestions here first, switching off dynamic distortion correction may also work.

edit: sorry, I see Wouter mentioned advanced already. 😉

Hey,

thank you for the quick reply!

I currently have no time to retry the integration because it takes forever...

So generally you can say that my problem comes from the amount of stars that I used for the registration?

The fact that APP is very slow in creating a final image (in my case with that many frames) makes it hard to trubleshoot everything..

I've also encountered a problem that the DDC distorted my image super badly! I will try it as soon as I can with more stars and share my result here! 

My full mosaic contains 100+ pannels so thats gonna be a hard one 😀

Kind regards

Jakob 

You can make the panels bigger, by combining a few first and the ending up with maybe 25 or so in the end, that might be a better option also to try and get the data a bit more manageable.

Posted by: @jkbsahner

So generally you can say that my problem comes from the amount of stars that I used for the registration?

Adding to what Vincent already replied: no, what we are saying is that you need to select advanced mode in tab 5 😉

Hey guys,

I did a new run and this time with (maybe way to many stars but I didnt care haha) approximately 20000 stars per image and with nomalization mode: advanced and after pretty much 24hrs I got this!

its perfect now! no problems anymore 🙂

Now Im going to calculate the big panorama and that will take 48 hrs I think but I really want this panorama stitched in APP because I had alot of problems in other programs with other processing techniques...

Thanks for your help!

Jakob

Okay after 2 weeks of trying everything I ended up with basically the top and bottom half of the mosaic...
APP is not able to register these two images with ALL different settings...

All things I tried didnt work and I dont have the time and power to invest more time into that because everything takes ages haha

I dont know why APP is failing to register these 2 images because there is more than enough overlap between the images!

Do you have some ideas how it could work?

Yes, very wide mosaic can be a bit challenging still. How many separate panels do you have right now? Would it be feasible to upload them for us to try?

@vincent-mod The intire mosaic contains 103 pannels :/ The folder is 13,6gbs big. The 2 bigger parts are almost 9gb/s in total... I dont know where to upload them haha but its possible yeah 

Yeah that will take a while. 🙂 Maybe compressed and then to our server? If it takes forever, we might want to try a different route, but I'm getting curious now as well on how to stitch it and to see if there is an issue with some panels.

Our server is here: https://upload.astropixelprocessor.com

Use upload as username and upload as password.

Create a directory named “jkbsahner-mosaicStitchIssue” and upload in there. Thank you!

@vincent-mod Okay thank you! I just started the upload 🙂

I'm not sure my laptop will like the amount of data, but I guess we'll find out. 😉 Thanks for trying.

@vincent-mod The upload is done!

May take a while for me to process, but I'll start on it. 🙂

One follow up question; what camera did you use? I need to know about the sensor.

@vincent-mod Sony a7s, so fullframe and a 135mm lens

Perfect! Thanks, continueing the investigation. 🙂

Ok, panels 1-20. Processing on my laptop took about 1.5-2 hours for this one. I used "calibrated projective" and put in your focal length and pixel size. This can speed up processing quite a bit. I also switched on LNC and that bascially took the most time out of all processing. Instead of rectilinear projection, I used equirectangular projection and when registration was finished, I checked the panels a bit using the option on top for "registered" frames. This will put the frame in the viewer on the spot where APP puts it after registration and correction. That way you can check if all is looking well before going through the lengthy integration process.

Ok, I'm going further with set 2. 🙂

@vincent-mod Okay sounds good so far! I have to add that the pannels are not sorted. At the end there are pannels that only fit with the top, bottom or top right side... Those are frames that I had to reshoot. I also only uploaded the pannels like 1-20,... because the upload window kicked me out 2 times, so I decided to split those files

Good point yes, might not work very well like this but I'll find out. I'm not sure if I can run it all at once, but I'll see.

Actually now trying everything together. To register all frames with calibrated projective takes 2 hours. I'm not sure if it does all of this correctly, so to not waste processing I save the registered frames. I can then skip registration later on. I first want to really look at the panels to see if there is no really weird stuff going on and then start integration. If at all that'll work, I'll send it tomorrow. 😉

@vincent-mod Have you made progress? 😀

Hey Jakob,

Well, my laptop is still churning. This is mainly because I have disk space issues, I need to buy another SSD internally. So I'm saving the registered frames to an older external HD and that is taking forever unfortunately. It is a big project so, I was a bit too optimistic thinking I would be done today. 🙂 It would be if I would be less careful, but I first want to carefully see if I can make it work and then share my settings.

@vincent-mod hehe yeah its a big project indeed! Hopefully it will work somehow 🙂 

Jep, it is. I think, even though I have 32 GB of memory, stacking is not going to do the complete mosaic. I'll likely scale it down in another attempt. Sorry for taking a bit long, have to deal with my resources on this one. 🙂 The data itself is very nice btw.

I think I'll also try to sort the data a bit better, so I can make bigger panels first.

@vincent-mod yeah no problem! Take your time 🙂 And yes the data is really good for the exposure time 😀

Ok Jakob, I unfortunately had to cancel the integration process. I tried to downscale the mosaic a lot, that worked memory wise etc, but I now lack HD space. 😉 So I will need to buy an extra SSD, which I will do anyway soon. I've asked Mabula/Wouter to give it a go later, they are also somewhat busy so I hope you can wait a bit longer.

The settings I tried were to register with 5000 stars etc (like you did to solve some of the issues you had) and then saving the registered frames. This way I should be able to skip star analysis and registration if I want to integrate at a later moment. You can try that as well. I used projective registration, this speeds this process up a bit as well. Don't use rectilinear projection, switch on advanced normalization and downscale the mosaic by a lot (like 0.1x) this will speed it up as well and hopefully can give you a quicker answer if the settings are correct.

@vincent-mod Okay no problem. I actually have registered all frames at once with your settings and it worked flawlessly. I used the equirectangular projection and the frames look good in the l-registered view! I will now safe them all and try to integrate them either all at once with a 0,1x factor just to get a result or maybe I will integrate like 20 images each time to safe/split the time to get the final result 🙂

Ok, sorry again, technology is failing me here a bit. But it's an excuse to upgrade stuff, which is always nice. 🙂 Hope you get something interesting! If not, we will continue the investigation.