I'll outline how this all played out over 6+months of exchanges with Sean and Sam. The Amp Glow I was seeing would not process out . I am not shooting bright objects but going for objects that required dozens of hours of exposures. In order to use my images I had to toss about 20% of the frame due to the Amp Glow. .... and ... I've been dealing with CCD calibrations at JPL for ages performing UV QE calibrations on WFPC2 and Cassini CCDs and others.
Sean and Sam suggested numerous potential solutions... swapping to USB 3.0 made a small improvement... changes to GAIN and OFFSET made virtually no change to the Amp Glow problem.
Since it could not be processed out it said to me that something was varying ... if that variance was internal to the camera I was basically out of luck.... I bought a second 1600 MM-c and it had a ZWO power supply ... The ZWO power supply was a much larger unit than my BRAND-X power supply ... My GUESS was that MAYBE the ZWO power supply was better and maybe more stable than the BRAND-X power supply .... At this point I was ready to dump the ZWO 1600 MM-c and go to a QHY CCD system. My LAST STRAW effort was to swap out the BRAND-X power supply for the ZWO power supply. I obtained an images sequence in Ha with the ZWO power supply and for the first time in 6+ months I had an final image that had ZERO Amp Glow... In the past 2 weeks I have obtained 2 other long images sequences that again show no Amp Glow. Of all the various and numerous possible solutions suggested and tested this is the ONLY one that finally eliminated ALL of the Amp Glow.
In the past 2 weeks I have gone from being certain that the ZWO 1600 MM-c was really not ready for prime time and that the CMOS systems were not going to work for my imaging needs to finally really being thrilled with the ZWO 1600 MM-c ..... and swapping out the BRAND-X power supply for the ZWO power supply was the swap that made all the difference in eliminating the Amp Glow problem...
I really posted this for the ZWO folk to close out this issue.. If the ZWO power supply had been available when I made my initial purchase I would have never seen the Amp Glow problem and would have been a happy 1600 MM-c owner from day one. Perhaps Sam and Sean can add info to this and explain why an obviously inferior power supply can severely degrade the performance of the 1600 MM-c
