Back in June 2023, I was sitting in Çeşme, Turkey, at around 2am, staring at an image I'd already taken before.

It wasn't bad. But I knew I could do better.

The problem was my setup. My telescope's focal length is too long to fit the whole Western Veil Nebula into one frame. So the image I'd taken with my DSLR a year earlier — while decent — had missed most of the detail I knew was there.

So I decided to try something I hadn't done before: a mosaic. Three separate panels, each one a different section of the nebula, imaged on different nights, then stitched together into one.

Planning it was one thing. I used a tool called Telescopius to calculate the exact coordinates for each panel so nothing overlapped badly and nothing got missed. That part went fine.

The stitching was another matter entirely.

Getting three separate images to look like one — matching the brightness, the colour, the background gradient across panel boundaries — took far longer than I expected. I redid sections. I tried different blending methods. I almost settled for a result I wasn't fully happy with.

Then I switched to my new cooled camera.

The difference was immediate. The noise that had always softened my images — that slightly muddy quality I'd learned to accept — was gone. The detail in the nebula filaments was cleaner than anything I'd captured before. And when I finally got the three panels to sit together properly, it looked like a single image. You couldn't see the joins.

I remember thinking: this is the one.

That image is now on a phone case.

→ See the Western Veil Phone Case

It's the same image. Real data, real telescope, real summer nights in Turkey. Three panels of the night sky, on something you can hold.

Karl