Starting with CaLIGHTs V3.1.6 it is now possible to select a custom output pedestal value. This creates an interesting opportunity to study your astrophotos at the electron level. You can now determine how many electrons have been collected at any given location in your astrophoto. You can also evaluate how much the CaLIGHTs noise filter can dramatically improve your astrophotos. One piece of information you need to determine is the system gain of your camera. The system gain tells you how to convert the pixels values into electrons. This can…
Category: QHY294C
Issues and post about the QHY294C camera
All about master Files video playlist
I just finished creating a new playlist containing several videos discussing master files. Learn more about taking quality master FLATs. Take a deep dive into what master BIAS and DARKs can tell you about your camera. I had to break up the video dealing with master BIAS and DARK frames into six parts…too much to discuss. I also present my results from evaluating DARK current in four different cameras. Nikon D5300, Canon 750D, QHY294C and ASI2600MC Pro.Peterhttps://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKWSWyofP8UR8ogS5pK-jnOlbyRrgomRA
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…
Nikon D5300 vs QHY294C
In 2020 I bought a QHY294C and had lots of opportunities to test out this dedicated cooled OSC astrocam. Up until 2020 I had been using a Nikon D5300 with was HA modified by Kolari Vision. The D5300 and QHY294C are 14 bit cameras. The Ha modification did improve the camera’s sensitivity and I noticed more detail in faint galaxies. I decided to start putting together some comparison images. The images presented here used master DARKs, FLATs and BIAS. The Bubble Nebula was my first comparison. This is a cropped…