Lowest limit of CMOS exposure?

But gathering light for less than a second on any sensor may subject you to random twinkle, which is different than Twinkies.

I used to do read at ~200Hz with a SIM SBC hooked to a 1P21, but averaged 1000 of them. Wasn't too terrible.

Ray TRE

Hi Kevin,

If you can find where you read that there was a short-exposure problem with CMOS, that would be helpful.

As Ray said, scintillation poses a limit for ALL cameras, not just CMOS.  The amount of scintillation noise depends on the exposure time, the aperture of your telescope, and the atmospheric conditions.  I usually don't recommend anything shorter than 5-10 seconds with small telescopes for the highest precision (say, an exoplanet transit).

Another issue with CMOS is if you continually take short exposures, like doing planetary imaging where you might take several thousand very short exposures in a row.  That will heat up the sensor and so limit the ability to cool it.

With very short exposures, how the sensor creates the short exposure can some into play, whether it is a rolling shutter or a global shutter.  At one second, this is not normally an issue

Other than that, I don't see short-exposure problems with the CMOS sensors that I've used.  For example, I've taken thousands of 0.2second exposures with a QHY600 CMOS camera, and the photometric results after stacking look just as good as single long exposures.

Arne