UPDATE FROM MABULA
I have had a very rough 2 months unfortunately health wise. I was struck 3x in a row with bacterial infections. The second infection occurred  after a routine hospital checkup and I became very sick. I had to rest and take a lot of antibiotics. Once I was recovering and restarting work 1 month ago, I again became sick. The infection was not yet gone, so even more antibiotics and rest was needed. Needless to say, it took a lot of my energy and I needed a lot of rest.
Finally, the infection is really gone and my energy is coming back step-by-step now and I have started work again. I am terribly sorry to have kept you waiting for support. I will address all outstanding questions and e-mails step-by step and will be on the forum daily from today.
APP 2.0.0-beta47 will come soon as well, a lot of work was already completed before I became very ill, so the release is also nearly ready for you. Beta47 will be much faster actually. Many workflows will be more than 2x faster, mosaics can even be 10x faster than before because registration really received a major boost... all compared to beta46. Â Before I release it, I will make sure that everything is working properly and then I will release it.
I have questions whether I am using the best practices to process a two-panel mosaic for Ha/OIII. I am processing light frames for 2 panels for the Heart Nebula captured with an Optolong L-Extreme. Â (I haven't tried this with more than 2 panels).
I load all frames for both panels (in a single session) and load the applicable calibration files. Â Calibration with defaults and Analyse Stars with an increased number (like 4000 or so).
In Registration enable Use Dynamic Distortion Correction and disable same camera. Â Increase Scale stop to 10. Â Set Mode to Normal, not Mosaic. Â (If set to Mosaic it requires thousands of "tasks" and runs forever). Â I can't see any difference in the results between using either Mode.
In Normalize use Advanced.
In Integrate use LNC (usually 2d degree and integrations up to 10) and MBB with percentage greater than the overlap percentage of the two panels. Â Run twice, once for Ha extract and once for OIII extract.
I have not had much luck running the two panels in 2 sessions requiring separate calibration frames. Â Also enabling Multi-Session Options to integrate the sessions separately (for the option to integrate the panels' Ha and OIII separately) as well as together makes the integration hang (at 72% each time) and never finish.
Any help on what I am doing right or wrong and whether I am doing this the most efficient way, would be appreciated.
Thanks, Jeff
Dear Jeff, @jhart
Please accept my apologies for the delay in my response.
The workflow that you describe is not our recommended workflow for any mosaic as described in our mosaic tutorial: https://www.astropixelprocessor.com/mosaic-tutorial-milky-way-to-rho-ophiuchi-by-mabula/
You indicate that you have 2 panels. Simply stack the separate panels per filter, so you will get a stack of Ha and OIII per panel, right? Do this with defualt settings, no need to increase star count to 4000 in 3) analyse stars for this.
When finished, you will have 4 mosaic panels, right? 2 panels for Ha and OIII.
Load those 4 panels are lights, increase star count in 3) to 2000-2500.
Register them as a mosaic, with same camera and optics disables and distortion correction enabled.
That should work and will complete very fast.
Let me know if this helps.
Mabula
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Hi Mabula,
Thanks so much for the guidance. Â You are correct, the mosaic processing you describe is very quick!
In loading the 4 (2 Ha and 2 OIII) integrated stacks as lights, I enabled Multi-Channel/Filter and loaded the 2 Ha with the Ha filter and the 2 OIII with the OIII filter. Â The result is an Ha mosaic and an OIII mosaic of the 2 panels-- ready for Combine RGB Tool. Â If the Ha and OIII integrations are loaded as lights with no filter designation, the result is a single integrated mosaic in grey scale.
One thing I noticed is that leaving Registration mode as Normal instead of Mosaic (done by mistake initially but tested some later) produced what appeared to be the same quality mosaic result as using Mosaic mode. Â Was that because I was doing only a 2 panel mosaic?
Do you expect your above described workflow to work equally well for mosaics with any number of Ha and OIII panels?
Thanks again for your help.
Jeff
Hi @jhart,
Indeed, with only 2 panels, everything has a common overlap area still and the mosaic registration is not even needed then.
And yes, with a higher number of panels, it should work equally as well, but keep in mind that the more panels you add, things will get more complicated fast. Make sure that the panels have enough overlap with other panels and then things will work 😉
Mabula
