That said, with some notable high-dynamic-range targets available in the sky – namely the Orion Nebula, M42, and the Andromeda Galaxy, M31 – it gave the camera a chance to demonstrate what it could do on a single target that has an extreme variance between its brightest and faintest areas.
With a set time limit for the review we decided to use just three arbitrary gain settings to ensure we got a selection of useable photographs, but we think the camera is likely to be capable of much better results than we achieved during our time with it, which was hindered in part by cloud and wet weather. With a wide range of available configurations governing exposure length and gain settings, we felt it would take us quite a number of clear nights experimenting to determine the optimal settings for each target. After allowing a few minutes for the cooling system to stabilise we chose a familiar target, the Pleiades, M45, to take some test images and to get a feel for the exposure settings to use on the camera.įrom the outset it became clear that this 16-bit camera is very different to the 12-bit models we have reviewed previously.