Experiments with camera cooling
20071009
I bought a damaged car cooler
(7 litre travel cooler) from a local electronics store and pulled the Peltier cooler-heatsink-fan assembly out and attached directly
to the GSTAR camera body with wire and springs.
Tests at prime focus
(200X equivalent power)
with the fan on and off showed no image degradation from vibrations.
Even though this works very well,
it is a bit of overkill. A smaller unit would be perfect.
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Ambient air temp 11deg C.
After about 12-15 minutes the camera housing was quite cool.
The dark frame produced below used full sense-up, no shutter, full camera gain and extra software gain.
Turning off the cooler and waiting for 20 minutes, another dark frame was taken (same settings as above).
Even though the ambient temp was falling, the noise increased noticeably as the camera warmed back to ambient.
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Dark frames
Most nights throughout the year, the hot pixels are not really a problem but during mid summer they can become pretty significant,
especially when extra gain is used in the capture software. This is when some cooling really helps to keep the hot pixel count down to a
manageable level.
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