thanks for all your suggestions and encouragement, plus to the private messages i got
ive been pondering this all day and the answer i think is this.....
if we assume the camera is sensitive ie 60% + QE then it
is capturing the photons , what is happening is the 'PixelWell if i can call it that is deep and holds far more than a dslr pixel well, say 45000 instead of 4500. this means the data can be stretched out..... if you get my drift.
So capturing 1800 photons for a given amount of time in a dslr gives you 40% full so a mid grey and about 1800/4500 x4096 (1638 levels of play)........ wheras 1800 photons in the Q8 gives a really dark, dark grey BUT (1800/45000 x 65000 gives you 2600 levels of play) does that make sense?
i will perservere for a while longer, i would like a confirmation from someone that my camera is behaving just like theirs as far as the comparison shot went, just to ease my mind a bit.
i will have a go withthe data i collected, it will be messy as the chip got quite dusty while iwas playing around with the condensation idea and i didnt check or see it until i did the daylight comparison shot so its got donuts and .... well a whole feed on it
.
i would end up by saying this perhaps as criticism , but i downloaded a trial version of nebulosity ....worth about 50 dollars when you pay for it, and also got an 85 page manual with it...... i have bought a 2600 dollar camera and got zippo in the way of instruction manuals or documentation that couldnt be written on one page, now i will give Gama his due he did email me and say if i had a problem i could call him, but the documentation really needs some attention, both in how the camera works and its uses what to expect etc, most of the people who buy this are coming from dslr which it appears is very different.
i hope i kept it reasonably polite.
clive.