Quote:
Originally Posted by gregbradley
To prevent highlights from blowing out in a long exposure perhaps?
From what little I have seen of this camera it seems to be its Achilles heel.
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Isn't blowing out the highlights always going to be a problem with chips with increasing sensitivity? I'd never thought of sensitivity as being a weakness before
Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmos
As you increase the gain it does drop the read noise but the overall dynamic range drops with it. i.e. the read noise falls slower than the decrease in well depth.
Yes you can image at gain 300 with 1s exposures in Lum (gregbradley noted that it clipped the core of M51 even at 1s). Using a 3nm Ha filter, if you can drop the read noise to 0.6e- you need ~50s exposures (at F/5) to be RN limited but your well depth is so shallow that even at that exposure time you're clipping.
To give a bit of a comparison, at gain 0 (where the 1600 has its highest dynamic range) compared to a KAF-16803 on the same telescope, they need about the same exposure time to become RN limited. This is given that the KAF has a RN of 8e- (I believe that RickS mentioned a while back that this is what his PL16803 gets at SRO), this is within a margin of 10% (the 16803 reaches RN limited a fraction quicker without taking dark current into consideration but the 1600 is likely to be lower in that regard) . The 16803 has 5x the well depth however so while the 1600 will clip stars and bright cores (thinking of lagoon, M31, M42 ect) the 16803 will barely notice the difference.
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So is the clipping stars a problem a result of the dynamic range/well depth or the sensitivity?
It seems that we all want the perfect chip but this isn't it, but then nothing ever will be. The 1600 sounds pretty impressive, my perspective being to use it as an alternative to an uncooled DSLR and more expensive astro CCD.
Have we figured out a way to get more than 12-bit data from the camera?
My angle is how we may need to adapt the way we image to the CMOS generation.