This is mostly just a public dump of some thoughts and not necessarily a commitment to SGPro…
We would like to introduce something that allows the SGPro community to easily share images captured by SGPro that also provide some amount of insight into the raw ingredients that go into making a beautiful image. Over the years we have found it somewhat challenging to collect images by SGPro. Lots of folks post them in public places like CloudyNights, Astrobin, Telescopius, SGL, etc. but less than half note the software used to capture their image. Don’t get me wrong this is not a complaint… we get it; it’s no more or less a tool than any other piece of gear in your rig, but it’s WAY less cool to be the proud owner of the intangible than it is to be the owner of an AP130 telescope. Even if we do find images by SGPro, there is no guarantee that the author will have taken the time to detail the capture process. After all… the capture process is of no interest to probably more than half of the image’s viewers.
So… we’d like to introduce a way to share finished images captured with SGPro. Shared by astrophotographers for astrophotographers. You would be able to to submit them straight from the SGPro app (maybe the website also, more on that later). A submitted image would automatically go into the SGPro image gallery and be publicly available to other SGPro users. Well, so what? I haven’t described anything particularly useful… so far just a less useful version of Astrobin. The difference here is intent. While it’s neat to share a finished product, the idea here for a browsing user is:
- Find an image thumbnail you like and click it
- Be presented with a larger image, but more importantly, a bunch of details about the raw ingredients
- Also, have a button, that will allow you to create a sequence as close to that image as possible with your gear.
For an astrophotographer that is inclined to share their work:
- Choose a finished image to share
- Choose the sequence / targets used to capture that image
- The tool will automatically extract non-personal info (number of exposures, filters, duration, binning), geographical latitude, target peak altitude , etc.
- For some images, they would begin to appear as part of the rotating image set for the SGPro startup splash screen.
AP is hard… we like to think of ways to make it more accessible… to lower the barrier to entry a little bit. Beyond fighting the gear, this part of AP can be very challenging for even intermediate-level APs.