Hi, this is my first post! Thank you for having me. I am Brian, American moved to England. I own an Lx850 12" MEADE in my family observatory. I have a ZWO294MC PRO. Its a fantastic camera but I think I'm making a mistake somewhere. I might have found the issue but i'll let you know my setup. First off, I don't take longer than 5 second exposures (I heard the camera has no shutter so taking tens of thousands of exposures is okay and not like a DSLR with a limit. So how I do this is I enter SHARPCAP program and I focus the camera at the highest gain possible. Then I will put down the gain to 450-480 level and set the live stacking to 2 second exposures for 1 minute. After 1 minute it takes the live stacked image and thats the result. (Attached) the object is NGC 7217. A very interesting galaxy in Pegasus. Now, my issue is.. I take 60 total images like this and put it into DeepSkyStacker. I get the final TIFF 16BIT file saved to my computer and process in photoshop. I get the final image. To me I thought I would get more detail after an hour. I am in Bortle 4.5 zone as well.
So, based off this method. Am I doing something wrong? My processing is good, there is no denying I can process because my DSLR photos were very decent but this Camera seems to lack photon intake or gathering details etc. Should I put the gain down to 200 regardless of how bright the sky is? I know my raw stacked 1 minute image has a bright sky. Is this the issue? Below is my Camera Settings and yes I do realize i've been shooting at RAW8 (Might be a significant issue). Thanks!
[ZWO ASI294MC Pro]
FrameType=Light
Debayer Preview=On
Pan=0
Tilt=0
Output Format=PNG files (*.png)
Binning=2
Capture Area=4144x2822
Colour Space=RAW8
High Speed Mode=Off
Turbo USB=80(Auto)
Flip=None
Frame Rate Limit=Maximum
Gain=473
Exposure=2.000s
Timestamp Frames=Off
White Bal (B)=95
White Bal (R)=52
Brightness=15
Cooler Power=12
Temperature=-5.3
Target Temperature=-5
Cooler=On
Auto Exp Max Gain=285
Auto Exp Max Exp M S=30000
Auto Exp Target Brightness=100
Mono Bin=Off
Background Subtraction=Off
Planet/Disk Stabilization=Off
Banding Threshold=35
Banding Suppression=0
Apply Flat=None
Subtract Dark=None
Display Black Point=0
Display MidTone Point=0.5
Display White Point=1
Notes=
TimeStamp=2021-11-28T19:22:57.5416930Z
SharpCapVersion=4.0.7976.0