Mosaic command (Tools menu)

A mosaic is a composite picture made of overlapping photographs. Astro-imagers often create a mosaic of large extended objects (such as the Veil Nebula, or the Andromeda Galaxy, or the Moon) by piecing together individual photographs with image processing software.

The process of acquiring individual photographs for a mosaic can be quite tedious. TheSky6 Professional Edition's Mosaic command is designed to make this task easier.

You define the geometry of your mosaic (that is, size of each photograph, the coordinates of the center of the mosaic, the size of the mosaic and the position angle). The Mosaic command uses this information to draw your mosaic (represented as red rectangles on the Virtual Sky), and labels each region to be photographed.

The telescope can be slewed to the center of each rectangle, then an image of this portion of the sky can be acquired (via traditional photography or CCD camera). Once an image has been taken for each rectangular area in the mosaic, each image can be combined into a single large mosaic using PhotoShop™ or other image processing software.