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Old 01-01-2015, 05:00 PM
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Amaranthus (Barry)
Thylacinus stargazoculus

Amaranthus is offline
 
Join Date: Jan 2014
Location: Judbury, Tasmania
Posts: 1,203
Assuming a linear accumulation of photons, yes, it means your subs are unnecessarily long, and about 5 times too long for your Lum.

Now although you are not losing data (faint stuff) by going longer, but you will be increasing the fraction of sky background in your total ADU (I assume that figures you quoted above are for the darkest parts of your image), and you won't be getting any significant benefits in read-noise compensation since you're way above the floor at this point.

Yes, you are also risking blooming (or just plain saturation of brighter objects, since your camera has anti-blooming) and making your life more difficult in terms of tracking/guiding. More subs also help in terms of statistical calibration and drizzling etc.

For colour balance, you need to map exposure length against your filter transmissibility etc. - different issue. But you can set each colour exposure length against the target ADU (2981) and then adjust the number of subs you take with each channel to get the colour balance you desire. Or simply tweak it in post-processing (or both!)

BTW, have you tried binning the 383L+ when you are centering, and putting it in 'preview' mode, for faster DLs?
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