owenmolly0409 What should I be looking for on the histogram at the bottom or any numbers in the read outs?
Check out Robin Glover's (SharpCap's author) tutorial.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RH93UvP358
You will be surprised at how short an exposure time you can get away with the low noise CMOS cameras from the past two or three years. Well, perhaps not very surprised if you follow Robin Glover's presentation.
From the signal processing viewpoint, you just need to expose for a length of time so the sky background noise is 10 dB over the read noise. From that point on, the read noise has almost no affect on signal to noise ratio. While increasing exposure time will only reduce the dynamic range (stars and galaxy cores will saturate).
Chen
