Is there any reference for suggested exposures with the CMSO line of cameras. I've used CCD for many years and the CMOS cameras seem to be a challenge with choices off exposure times and modes. I've imaged with RCs for years and typically used 15-20 minute exposures for LRGB and 30 minutes on NB. Gain and Offset wasn't a choice. So now with the 24" f'7 RC and the AC4040BSI finding the correct exposure is messing with me. For now I'm using High Gain so that's what I'd like to start with until I get educated. Any suggestions? Also what exposure length for mapping runs? Thanks for any assist.
The read noise is lower so you can do much shorter exposures. That also helps with the more limited dynamic range in High Gain mode. Personally, if you're just using High Gain I'd back off the gain setting a little bit. You want the read noise to be sampled by about 2 bits. That said, I would recommend using High Gain Stack Pro mode. Doing that will allow you to use similar exposure times to what you are used to.
Maybe I'm not reading the manual correctly but if this takes multiple frames and then combines them how can you be sure you don't have a bad frame or two messing up the resulting stacked image? I remember way back in the old days when SBIG had a feature when you used Track and Accumulate, is this the same concept?
You need to think of StackPro exposures as being effectively a single long exposure. Yes if an airplane flies through during the third subexposure the result is junk, but the same would apply for a single long CCD exposure. If you want to you can take a whole pile of really short High Gain mode exposures and stack them in software. It just results in 16X of the disk space usage and a lot more processing, for what is likely to be minimal improvement (if any).
