If I want to increase the total exposure time, is it more efficient to increase the number of coadds or do additional exposures/readouts?
A. Increasing the number of coadds is the best way in terms of efficiency (smaller overheads) but it is not the recommended method. Rather, you should consider increasing the number of repeats. The reason for doing this are 2: 1) if you use multiple coadds and have one bad exposure for some reason, it will affect all the coadded exposures, and 2) you will have longer time between the individual raw frames being written, so you’ll have less frequent visual feedback on the data acquisition while observing. Finally, if you combine a long sequence of coadds with a long sequence of jittering, you might end up not sampling the sky frequently enough.
