I've got this QHY163M for more than 2 months. But as the bad weather and the terrible frog in China, I did not have many chance to get out and test it.
Last time I used this camera to shot the horsehead nebular as the first light.
This time, we made a big team of astronomy enthusiasts. The same reason as above, everyone was excited for this trip.
We drove about 150km into a barren hill to escape from the city lights and faced a really cold night. I found ice in my tent in the morning...
I planed to take M42 from sunset to about 10:00 pm at which time the target pass the mid-sky, and then turn to M78 until the moon raised. The first target was almost perfect.
I set gain=0 and exposure time=180s to prevent overexposure. It worked perfectly. With nearly 2 hours exposure, I think it was fine.
But then I was lazy for the M78. I did not change the gain value and just set the exposure time to 300s. I paid for this. All signal was at the left of the stretch. As QHY163M had a 12bit ADC.Due to the lack of sampling precision, signal of the object had lots of noises after DDP. It took me a lot of time to denoice and make it look not so bad.
Btw, My telescope is SkyWatcher 150/750 reflector.
During the time I was taking M42, I setup another system to shot Orion with my mirror-less camera, lens and a tracker just for fun. I even did not take the bias and dark frames.
It did not take a long time, but it seems not bad after 24min cumulative exposure.
the camera was Olympus E-M10 and the lens was Samyang 135mm T2.2
