I have recently been doing a bit of work with my QHY8Pro with regard to flat frame images.
You may already be aware of all this but it may well be a different approach to the flat file problems a lot of us suffer.
With a lot of the new cameras having a well depth of only 25ke, I was under the impression my fats should have a maximum ke value of between a third and half the well depth. I often found these flats to be near useless.
Sitting back and thinking about the methods used to capture flats and in particular the software used I came to the conclusion (right or wrong) that the process used by me was wrong.
The image is taken with a camera with a well depth of say 25ke. It runs the image through the cameras analogue to digital converter and down loads the image to the laptop at full 16 bit depth. At this bit depth it transforms the image into a format which makes it appear as a well depth of 65000e or, well you all know the figure anyway. When measurements are taken at the capture software on the computer which indicates a full 65000e.
The assumption I have made is that when using a CCD with an AtoD converter our flats should be taken between a third and half the resultant output as at the computer. ie. 65ke So in essence instead of capturing flats at 9 to 12 thousand we should be using ADU figures between 21000 and 32000e.
The few experiments I have done do seem to indicate much better results from flats taken at this much higher exposure and ADU count.
I am interested to hear if anyone else has found the same improved results or has noticed any other ways to improve the use of flat files.
