Hey Stephane, sorry about that - should have included that in my first post. And thanks! My first time blending Ha in to an image like this, it certainly is tricky finding the right blending point to keep that lovely blue fringe.
L - 60s
RGB - 120s
Lum was closest to being properly 'swamped', but stars were already showing some bloat by then.
My main point is highly specific to this camera compared to other current zwo cmos cameras. Most have between 3.5-4e read noise at 0 gain/lcg, and I got lazy and assumed same for this chip without specifically checking. I've gone this long being ignorant about it because I almost always do narrowband, at hcg where the read noise gets ridiculously low (~2e).
the 294 though has ~7.3e read noise at nil gain in bin2 mode, so you gots a heck of a lot more swamping to do than other popular cmos chips. my experience is that I wouldnt be able to raise the mean adu much further without too much saturation in the brighter parts of the image.
so next time, I'm just going to wear the extra files and preprocessing time and shoot at the low read noise gain
I think for my setup that will be ~30s L and stay at 120s for RGB at 120 gain. 10hrs+ of L in 30s subs, hard drive cries.