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There is the rub, the sensor in the 294 has four times the dynamic range as the ADC it is supplied with. The effective change to the noise profile is pretty visible, at the gain that brings the highest dynamic range the read noise is about four times what it is at unity gain. At unity gain, bright stars will be effectively saturated quite quickly when the ADC runs out of range. It sort of comes down to a choice between nice looking stars or a nice background and faint detail. Or possibly a workflow that looks like it was made by a glass blower with hiccups to lay in nice, unsaturated stars on a nice, smooth, low noise background.
I a not feeling cheated, they are a entry level camera after all and I think that it has produced some really nice results for me, sort of the story of my whole setup. Lots of work to produce reasonably solid results out of “modest” gear.
My real take out I think is that if you can afford it you will get the best out of a camera where the ADC range matches the sensor range. 5 minutes around M42 probably has a lot greater dynamic range than you would get in the IMX294’s native use as a security camera sensor.
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