Group frames into panels for mosaics

Remember the time when we didn't have APP to create mosaics so easily? 🙂 Thanks for the suggestion, I'm not sure if this can be done automatically as APP doesn't know what belongs to 1 panel by itself. Maybe Mabula (@mabula-admin) has an idea on it.

It's still not easy doing large mosaics...it's pretty hard to get a flat field with a 4x4 mosaic.

Here's something i cooked up pretty early in the project for M31, i still have to gather RGB, Ha and probably add 2-3x as much luminance.
There's no MBB applied to this.

Did you use advance integration and LNC? Those should help with getting the frames equal. With easy I mean the calibration and registration, this used to be a process of hours/days just by itself before APP.

Yes all panels were integrated alone at first, just throwing all into APP would takes ages with 16 panels with 12-24 subs per panel.
I didn't use LNC on the integrations, i will try that and hope it gets better.

It should as that's one of the functions of it.

I just asked this in the general section as well, this would be a huge time saver, please consider it. APP's strength is Mosaics, this feature would solidify it's lead in this area.

/Yves

I remember reading on the fora here that plate solving is on the feature list for a future update. This would be an excellent basis for the requested feature.

If I'm not mistaken, the normal registration of N images takes order (N-1) registration actions, but for mosaic registration it takes order N * (N-1) / 2 registration actions. With 34 panels (may latest mosaic) that's still feasible, but with 619 exposures (the total number in my latest mosaic) it would take forever. With plate solving, only order N blind plate solving actions would be needed to know where each exposure (or panel) is located on the sky.

Blind plate solving would help immensely to automatically group exposures into panels, or even allow proper identification of the location, orientation and scale of all the exposures in a huge all-exposures-in-one-go mosaic.

I'd love to help think about a means to set this up. Just let me know @vincent-mod or @mabula-admin if I could help in any way. I've been playing extensively in the past with my own homebrew stacking software (though never got as far as mosaics or distortion correction).

@ralph

We do not need plate solving for the individual stacks ... the coordinates are already in the single subs ... Could be nice down the road to help with speed and accuracy though ...

For now it would be sufficient I could load all the subs of a 9 panel mosaic in one go and get 9 stacks out of it, instead of loading them 9 times individual and wait in between ...