QHY294C Fullwell limitation at GAIN=1600

REVISED March 7th, 2021- See the bottom of this post for more info… The QHY294C OSC camera has a LGC/HGC mode that switches to it’s low noise High Gain Control[HGC] mode when the GAIN equals 1600 or higher. Normally, a user would not expect that the camera to be limited by it’s fullwell. The QHY294C has an impressive fullwell of ~65,000e-. QHY’s current implementation of the HGC mode causes the fullwell to dramatically drop to ~10,000e-. These cameras have lots of sophisticated hardware on the imaging chip so it’s difficult…

D5300 vs QHY294C Elephant’s Trunk

One of my best astrophotos with my Nikon D5300 was of the Elephant’s Trunk Nebula. I didn’t use any filters and I found that the small details were very interesting to study. All of the major details in the Elephant’s trunk are present in both images. The L-eNhance filter seems to bring out even more interesting details. As the Elephant’s trunk stretches upwards you can see that the D5300 image without filters grows vague. The QHY294C+L-eNhance filter image maintains it’s details much further up the Elephant’s trunk. The stars were…