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Old 07-12-2019, 11:19 AM
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Atmos (Colin)
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Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Melbourne
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When I get some time later on today I’ll go into some detail but quickly; dynamic range is a description of the number of discreet usable steps in the data.

Take my ASI094 at Gain 0. It has a well depth of about 55,000e- and a read noise of 3.4e- RMS. it’s dynamic range is 55000/3.4= 16,176 steps

It has a 14-BIT ADC which has 2^14 discreet steps available or 16,364 steps.

Or the KAF-16803 has 100,000 well depth and maybe 8.5e- RMS read noise.
100,000/8.5= 11,765 BUT it has a 16-Bit ADC with 65,536 steps.

Neither of these cameras need more than a 14-Bit ADC due to the number of steps in the data produced by the sensor.

As I said earlier there is a little imprecision introduced by having the 14-bit ADC in a 16-bit FITS file BUT this is LESS than the photon shot noise and given a handful of exposures averages itself out anyway.
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