Problem with Flats

Starks documentation doesn't say if the camera has to be cooled to do this it just says "Now fire up the camera and connect it to your capture software. Right aware fire off......"

He mentions "Since the camera is ambient"

So do I not need to cool the camera to do any of this?

CarlightExpress wrote: Starks documentation doesn't say if the camera has to be cooled to do this it just says "Now fire up the camera and connect it to your capture software. Right aware fire off......"

He mentions "Since the camera is ambient"

So do I not need to cool the camera to do any of this?

Where he says 'since the camera is ambient' it's purely for dark current stabilisation so he's taking images to see how stable the image is over time. If you dont have cooling then you'd expect the camera to warm up and dark noise to increase; if you do then you'd expect it to drop to the set point and stay constant. I need to go back and work on that section to see what kind of advantage I'm getting from operating at -20C rather than say 0C.

In the 314l+ review he sets the camera to 0C. I think the important thing was that the temperature could stay constant. I set it to 0C for my experiments - it made it easier to try this in the comfort or a warm room

Temperature won't matter to the bias frames. It should have a contribution to the flats for calculating the gain, but since your flats will be done with a short exposure the contribution of dark current should be negligible, so just subtracting the master bias will suffice. The contribution from the bias doesn't even affect the gain calculation too much in my case it results in a 0.002 difference.

Enjoy the red bull

This guide

www.cademuir.eu/blog/2014/01/31/analysin...timal-exposure-time/

Mentions setting it to 0C and doing 2x2 binning, so I am confused as to whether the camera should be cooled to normal exposure temperature, partly cooled to 0C or ambient temperature

Simon - this was one source I used for my CCD Characterisation. Page 9 sums up the methodology pretty well. It takes a good few reads, a few trials of the method and a bit of patience before you get it. That said, the process can be done in the house next to your PC.

www.narrowbandimaging.com/images/ptc_tal...nal_comments_web.pdf

Dave

Doc not found

Found it, correct link is

www.narrowbandimaging.com/images/ptc_tal...nal_comments_web.pdf