sn2006gy

I just shot it in color. (no filters)

Why would APP debayer dark frames though?  That doesn't seem right. 

To be honest, I don't really dark calibrate myself. 2600 is so clean and I dither every frame for clearing up FPN/Hot pixels.

Does APP have HDR Composition?  In PI that's what I'd do for this particular topic.

Did you have a light leak?

My master dark with my 2600mc pro looks like this:  

I haven't really seen the tools change much - camera raw to remove flats if you didn't flat field and similar things are coming along nicely, but i guess the biggest advancement for me is just experience - getting better at processing "old" data.

Great start!

I had to go shorter subs with a slower scope but this doesn't look too bad.  I did 350x45 seconds at F5 with a 2600mc pro.

That came out great! One of the better images i've seen from that lens to be honest! A lot of times they seem over sharp or too softened to reduce stars, this shows the nebulosity, dust and stars great

Open sourced the data: Rosette Nebula - OSC Narrowband Processing (rockchucksummit.com)  feel free to download and share your own remix/reprocess!

67x300 Seconds on Triad - WBPP Integration with CFA (bayer drizzle)

• Split Channals
• R=Ha
• G+B = O

12x480 Seconds with Antlia S2

• SuperPixel Debayer WBPP Integration
• Resampled to match Ha and Oiii

SHO Integration with PixelMath

More details on Astrobin. I plan on doing other updates/mixes and sharing the details on astrobin so be sure to follow along if you want to see more SHO with OSC cameras.

https://astrob.in/w9etg0/0/

Is there sample data of what fully calibrated images we all love would/should look like?  

If you leave the tilt plate on to screw into the 2600 with a m48 or m42 EFW, the backspace between camera and filter may be too much for the 36mm filters

I use a 2600mc with an Esprit 120 and I use 2" filters with an EFW.  The 2600 is the same body as the 6200 so it has the same connections available which means that everything is bolted on in the same ways. So whatever you see supported on the 6200, is the same for the 2600 on zwo's website.

The 6200/2600 are fairly heavy cameras. In order to avoid sag, I use a setup like this.  Esprit 120 -> Reducer -> 6200 Tilt Plate Bolted to -> OAG Bolted to -> EFW Bolted to -> 2600mc pro

I would avoid anything that isn't bolted if you can, which means using 2" filters for now, but rumor is ZWO will have a bolt in 36mm efw available as well, but i expect it won't necessarily be much cheaper due to competition for 36mm filters.

For my Pleiades I went with 100s of really short exposures.  (45 seconds).  I find with longer exposures you tend to lose the stars and the dust still comes through with shorter subs. Those 7 sisters are mega bright and long subs seem to cause them to bloat/get lost or surface halos

I have the Esprit 120 and i have mine just in front of where yours is. Instead of behind the dewshield, just right in front of the dew shield screws.  I found it worked well there. People swear by both,  i'm not sure the dewnot has enough oomph to heat the entire lens cell but it seems to have enough power to keep it dry just in front of primary lens.

For DSLR, you would really only worry about darks according to time.  Time does reflect temperature since there will be a heat build up but chasing temperature would be impractical since the temperature increases over entire duration, not just the individual sub. 

If you have a cooled camera, obviously just cool to fixed temps

You can download this data and see my super simple processing guide.  Triad filter north America nebula  North America Nebula NGC 7000 (rockchucksummit.com)  I'm updating my guides to show HOO processing.  (several other data sets for you to download and mess around with too)

Jellyfish Nebula

Full stats on astrobin: https://astrob.in/cvina1/0/

What I'd like to see is continue to support the duality of science/art but allow people to contribute their subs/unprocessed masters as part of a greater collection where the science of consumer astrophotography is gathering more data than any other way would be feasible. By this, i mean allow us to share our masters and use science to improve the integration, calibration and processing techniques thereof.   You know, move to massively parallel calibration and GPU assisted integration & stacking.  This way we could be creative with what we capture locally but share the fruits of our labor and help improve data on a global scale.  Could be kind of cool. 

Most professional observatories are already moving to parallel mirrors and collection across multiple scopes in lieu of bigger and more cumbersome scopes.  Imagine if we helped usher that in for amateur astrophotography

2 hours ago, vlaiv said:

Interestingly enough - even people who take processing very seriously and try not to push their data beyond what it can deliver, that like tight stars and detail and want their denoising to be subtle and unnoticeable - can't make repeatable results.

This is the reason why we have this discussion in the first place and the reason why there are long held beliefs - that "there is no actual true color of the object and you can do what you want" or "no image is authentic" or whatever.

But that is not reality. Two people should be able to produce same looking image of celestial object using different gear if they agree on basic set of rules - like use authentic color, stretch luminosity in certain range (like mag27 is black point mag18 is white point, gamma is set at 4, etc ...)

It is just when we define exact protocol that we can get repeated results. When you take two different DSLR cameras and take image of object, you will get the same image provided you use the same settings and the rest of the protocol is defined at factory.

You can make repeatable results and there is "relative true color"

I wouldn't focus the repeatability on ensuring every sensor and every scope is the same, I'd get the repeatability on understanding the masters and how those masters were processed to whatever creative means.

On my images, I don't denoise.  I moved  my gear to a B1 sky and take enough data that denoising now seems to distract or cause more harm than good. I realize everyone can't do this, thus I share my data and I share my steps and those steps are repatable that if you follow them, you can have the same image output. One could use scripts to programmatically do the processing as well so its not how much you slide the slider or stretch the stretch, but rather a re-usable algorithm that's precise enough to have the desired effect on a fully calibrated system (monitors and such)

I guess my point is more of, none of this matters.  In one aspect, you're impressing a smaller and smaller group of people that obsess about it and often the end result is they will find something else wrong with your effort or feel hyper competitive to one up you.   On the other side of the spectrum, doing something with literally nothing and getting a nice image finds a lot more traction and a lot more reward for much less effort.

The discussions about true color are funny...  and often times used to confuse objective vs subjective discussions and not the actual experiment or practices that got us to where are are. In the end, if you know that person did good because it wasn't a modded dslr and they got that good of an image, more people probably recognize that than someone who has a top of a line image with a few non round stars that gets no recognition because someone else has just as sharp of an image with a slightly better reducer and used a name brand camera that the people upvoting give more street cred to.

It's really fascinating and odd...

Its's science and it's art and making it only art or only science is worse than letting it be.

I'm curious about this topic as well, mostly because what we enjoy/share and publish is almost entirely inconsistent

We buy all this gear, calibrate for perfection and we strive for dark skies, long integrations and perfect data. Those who push the limits of capturing based on trying to capture data gently, seem to build a smaller and smaller audience of only those who understand the difficulty of such, but those who saturate, blow out colors,  over stretch contrast and make things look vibrant get a huge audience because you don't need to understand any of the complexity to be impressed by the sheer magnitude of what was imaged.

Obviously, an audience doesn't matter but when it comes to creativity, art and imaging - without sharing it with people and without feedback, you'll probably burn out and move along or your interest wasn't in the imaging to begin with - you like building, making, tweaking, experimenting.

Take reddit for example, some very impressive images of hundreds of hours of work get a few upvotes and a few comments, but generally don't rank up. BUT.. if you had a dslr and a telescope that more people know and you got an image that is bright and stretched you can get 1000s of likes.... i look at those images and i'm like "wow, look at those gradients, look at those blown out stars, look at the loss of color, dust motes/donus, bad colors, can't make anything out"... but... this is more relative to the general population then my expensive dark sky setup so most people see "good" where i see "problems" and their scale of good is much different than mine because its more relative to their experience.

So in the end, I guess do what you want to do, find your audience and realize not everyone's context is equal.