1/2 gigapixel panorama of the
Milky Way center over La Palma
Details
This is my biggest success in astrophotography so far! Several months of different tests as well as different processing and settings have brought me to this result 🙂
My 135mm half-gigapixel panorama of La Palma version 2. The first version was far from good by today's standards and I knew there was much more in it.
It took me a long time to figure out how to stitch all the sky data into a perfect mosaic. Thanks to the help of @michael_ostaszewski I was able to stitch the sky perfectly in Astropixelprocessor, which took 3 days of computation!
The processing of the sky was done in Pixinsight with many different adjustments in Photoshop, where I also blended the foreground.
The image consists of 128 frames in total.
104 for the sky and 24 for the foreground. It is my most detailed image yet with a total resolution of 570 megapixels!
Recording
Camera
Sony a7s astromodified
Lens/Telescope
Samyang 135mm f2, set to f2.5 during shooting
Tripod/Mount
Rollei c6i / Skywatcher Star adventurer Pro Pack
Filter
No filtering on this shot
Exposure
104 pannels for the sky with 6×30 seconds single exposures each (3 minutes total) Single regions like the area around Rho Ophuichi have approx. 10min exposure for more details!
24 pannels for foreground with 1min exposure each
Editing
Stacked and calibrated with flats, darks and bias in Astropixelprocessor
Edited with Pixinsight and Photoshop