[Todo43 (Lachlan)]

Hey everyone,

I have big plans for tonight with new gear and dark skies. I have seen a couple of people in the past few weeks in their image details, they have their camera settings that say their camera and then "set to highest dynamic range". This made me wonder, with my ASI 533MC Pro, and my plans for the horsehead nebula, should I be using "highest dynamic range", "unity gain" or "lowest read noise"?

I plan on imaging the horsehead nebula, so quite a faint target, in about B2/3. It is a pretty slow telescope at f/6.67 and my recent images of the horsehead have been extremely noisy. These previous attempts have only had about 30-60mins of data however. I am aiming for approximately 4-5 hours tonight at 300s exposures.

I have a limited understanding of these such camera specs such as gain and offset which is why I would love some input. Thanks so much everyone!


Attached is an example of the noise I am getting in my images. I take flats after every session, and have a library of darks and biases all at my normal temp of -10c