No worries - here to help.
I just found this great link with best ISOs to use for various models, include the 60D and 6D;
http://dslr-astrophotography.com/iso-va ... n-cameras/
Safe travels!
EDIT: Now for your data set;
67ssdan wrote: it seems to all go sideways in the wipe section. The image is taken of the Milky Way this time of year, which obviously means it's just ahead of sunrise. There was some early pre-dawn light on the horizon already, and the software seems to just go nuts with that.
Wipe will be able to handle it just fine (see further below), however the biggest problem with any non-object-of-interest light is that it adds an overwhelming amount of signal
+ its noise component. Wipe can subtract the estimated signal, but not its noise component. This is the reason why astrophotographers only tend to image under the darkest skies they can find.
If you could only watch one video ever in your life about atrophotography, let it be this one;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EO4QFb3ydNM
In it, Craig Stark (author of Nebulosity and PHD) explains why you'd want dark skies.
That looks as expected.
As I mentioned earlier, you'll want to use Wipe with a mask that masks out (e.g. make non-green) the terrestrial bit. It's also important to remove (using Crop) any stacking artefacts (here to the left of the image). Anything that is not real sky signal needs to be masked out.
Is this doable at all?
Definitely.
Here goes (using 1.4.330);
--- Auto Develop
To see what we got.
We can see oversampling/star trailing. We can also see a lot of noise. We can see stacking artefacts to the left, top and bottom of the image. There is some stacking mis-alignment in the upper right corner.
--- Bin
Binning trades resolution for noise reduction. I'm binning hard as the image is very noisy and the star trails are "smearing out" detail anyway.
Parameter [Scale] set to [(scale/noise reduction 25.00%)/(1600.00%)/(+4.00 bits)]
--- Crop
Parameter [X1] set to [14 pixels]
Parameter [Y1] set to [11 pixels]
Parameter [X2] set to [1294 pixels (-6)]
Parameter [Y2] set to [863 pixels (-3)]
--- Wipe
As said above, create a suitable mask, should look roughly like so;
-
- Screenshot.jpg (89.94 KiB) Viewed 6714 times
Parameter [Dark Anomaly Filter] set to [5 pixels]
I'm bumping up Dark Anomaly filter to 5 pixels as a precaution (it filters out smaller darker-than-real-celestial-background pixels if we missed them in our mask).
--- Develop
The signal is very weak and the noise is extreme. AutoDev does not tend to deal well with this, so I'm using a manual Develop.
Choose "Redo stretch". Develop has a semi-auto mode though - just press "Home In" a few times until it stabilises.
Now that we have finalised the luminance/brightness/detail, it's time to do final color calibration;
--- Color
The Color module tends to come up with a pretty decent color balance all by itself. But sometimes it needs some help (especially images like these unfortunately where things near the horizon appear redder due to the atmosphere).
Things to look out for are a good random distribution of star colors (equal amounts red->orange->yellow->white->blue).
Another thing to look out for is purple/pink HII areas.
The Max RGB view should not show large contiguous areas of dominant green (speckles and noise is ok though). If it does, dial back the green parameter (as I did here). Very few things in outer space are green-dominant (there a few exceptions).
However, this is also where things get exciting and where all using an AP-specific program starts to pay off - you've picked up some purple HII areas. If I zoom in there is a purplish blob with a cyanish core - this is M8 if I'm not mistaken;
-
- Autosave002(4)_purple.png (42.76 KiB) Viewed 6714 times
Parameter [Cap Green] set to [To Yellow]
Parameter [Dark Saturation] set to [3.50] to introduce more color in the dark regions.
Parameter [Blue Bias Reduce] set to [1.17]
Parameter [Green Bias Reduce] set to [1.70]
Parameter [Red Bias Reduce] set to [2.63]
No noise reduction applied when switching off Tracking (do this to taste).
What you end up with is something like this;
-
- Autosave002(4).jpg (228.18 KiB) Viewed 6714 times
You just need many, many more exposures under the darkest skies you can find. Tracking will help, but you may be able to get away with no tracking if you keep the exposures short and reduce rsolution.
Hope this helps!