Why Camera Coolers Are Awesome

[JacobvonChorus]

Hello,

So I still haven't been able to get my new Atik 314L+ out for a true first light yet...thank you Canada. So I decided to see just how much of a difference the cooler makes. This was just a real quick test. Nothing more than two biases, one a room temperature, one at max cooling. The one at room temperature had a sensor temperature of about 19°C, the cooled bias had a sensor temperature of -8.5°C. The difference is massive. The uncooled image had a gradient, not bad at all, but existent First of all, the gradient is eliminated. I am assuming that gradient is caused by the ADU or something like that and by cooling it down, it behaves more nicely. The uncooled image had a standard deviation of 49.8, the cooled image had a standard deviation of 20.5!!!! Insane!!! The background brightness decreased significantly as well. The mean went from 349ADU, to 260ADU. These are just bias frames. So I am pretty happy and I don't know how I can wait any longer for good weather!!! Darks would have been better for the test since reducing dark noise is the point of the cooler. The reason I didn't is I noticed that some old uncooled images had that high standard deviation while some even older cooled biases didn't. I just wanted to make sure that it was the cooler being off that caused that high standard deviation, not something breaking... It's all good though so I am pretty excited if you can't already tell.

Jacob