[Shiraz (Ray)]

stars are beaut Grady, but it looks like you have some fixed pattern noise that is walking across the background. maybe have a close look at your dark and bias process to see if there is something imprinting itself on the lights. It could even be pixel to pixel sensitivity variations that will respond to accurate flats, but have not observed anything like that on mine.

M&T, agree that these chips do not bypass basic physics, but they do allow some things that are simply impossible with other chips. Grady's perfect stars at 1.09 arcsec from an EQ6 are an example of what is possible when you can reach sky-noise-limited performance in 60 seconds rather than 25 minutes (for a 16803 for example- there is about a 25:1 difference in required sub lengths for the two chips, all else being equal). Of course Grady will need 25 x as many subs to get the same SNR, but he will have the resolution advantage of throwing out any short term poor seeing data and will never have any problems with field rotation if he moves his system. The 1600 ushers in a new way of doing business that changes many of the old assumptions about how good the mount must be and how long the subs must be to detect dim signals. Of course it not yet time to throw out existing high end systems, but the 1600 camera allows "high end" equivalent results to be produced with much lower spec systems (mounts in particular).