Going big with the Soul Nebula
This is my first attempt at a mosaic… basically stitching together three views of an object that’s normally too large in the sky to fit within the field of view of my telescope. It came out alright!
We’ve had a great run of clear nights the past few weeks in Florida, and I’ve invested just about every moment of them into this image. Each of these three panels incorporates about 25 hours of exposure time, for a total of close to 80 hours.
The original image is too big to host on the web! But you can still zoom in and explore lots of little details here, even thought it’s been reduced by 50%.
With an image this big, you can often create artistic new ones by cropping and rotating it. Here’s a cool composition of an interesting piece of the nebula:
