I recently watched Robin Glover's excellent talk on deep sky imaging with one shot color cameras. I also read his SharpCap forum write up on setting the exposure time for a site's sky brightness. Robin also gets into the mathematical justification in the write-up which I like. It seems that for my typical F/4 configuration with the Starizona Night Owl focal reducer, exceeding 30sec sub frame exposures offers no signal to noise benefit. This is a real eye opener. Instead, best practice is to collect as many sub frames to achieve a certain total exposure time. For example 120x30sec exposures for an hour. These concepts were played with the six images below from the most recent two imaging sessions.
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NGC 281 (Pacman Nebula)
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NGC 6992 (Eastern Veil Nebula)
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NGC 7635 (Bubble Nebula)
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Messier 13 |
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NGC 7023 (Iris Nebula)
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NGC 7380 (Wizard Nebula)
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