Anyone found unusual hot pixels last week?

[ollypenrice]

Three ZWO cameras operating here last week threw up lots of hot pixels for the first time in their lives. This may be coincidence but could it be environmental? Defective mains supply, solar activity, something else?

Anyone else have unusual issues?

Olly

[gorann]

Interesting. If it were particles from the sun I assume they would hit pixels att random so not occur on subsequent subs.

Edited Monday at 15:13 by gorann

[Elp]

Maybe all that red anodising has finally taken its toll...

Mine have been working fine, even during the aurora on 10/11th, though there was the large X class solar flare which occured prior.

It's a very high improbability that three independent units would show the same issue at the same time, so my guess would be there's something localised which has caused it.

[Ags]

Radioactive guests?

[tomato]

Cosmic rays tend to leave little tracks rather than single pixels. How have the nighttime temperatures been, but I presume you are using actively cooled cameras?

I did see a lot of bright pixels on a stack of ASI178 mono Ha images taken on Saturday night, compared to a stack taken a few nights earlier, so there could be something going on.

[TiffsAndAstro]

5 hours ago, ollypenrice said:

Three ZWO cameras operating here last week threw up lots of hot pixels for the first time in their lives. This may be coincidence but could it be environmental? Defective mains supply, solar activity, something else?

Anyone else have unusual issues?

Olly

Are they persisting over time?

Does on/off make them reset?

Are they in darks? And or bias

Is pattern same across each sensor? (This would be very weird)

 

[wimvb]

And here I was thinking you were missing some. Either way, I'm afraid I can't help you. Clouds and the flu have kept me from astro for a week now.

Btw, cosmic rays CAN create hot pixels if they are energetic enough to destroy those pixels. But this is not very likely.

Edited 14 hours ago by wimvb

[gorann]

9 hours ago, wimvb said:

And here I was thinking you were missing some. Either way, I'm afraid I can't help you. Clouds and the flu have kept me from astro for a week now.

Btw, cosmic rays CAN create hot pixels if they are energetic enough to destroy those pixels. But this is not very likely.

But that is a scary thought that all our cameras are right now permanently degraded by the high solar activity. Does it matter if they are turned off or on?

[Steve Ward]

I would think that the recent G4 solar storm that hit us could well be the cause.

 

The X-1.7 flare threw off a major CME and proton storm that caused a very elevated and prolonged proton flux levels here on Earth , causing the aurora display captured extensively around the globe.

Very energetic proton storms have been known to have detrimental effects regading satellite electronics and also affect solar panel efficiency so no doubt they cold do similar here if high enough.

The sensor on the LASCO Coronograph was peppered with protons for a prolonged period , unfortunately I didn't save those images for some reason but Paulastro did as it was just as 'the comet' appeared on the C3 sensor , he posted them up on SGL here ... 

 

 

Edited 3 hours ago by Steve Ward

[TiffsAndAstro]

If it were protons and or cme surely this would be a known phenomena by now?

 

[Elp]

Large scale CMEs are known to cause distruption to electronics and infrastructure, communications get affected as do power lines for example.

[TiffsAndAstro]

21 minutes ago, Elp said:

Large scale CMEs are known to cause distruption to electronics and infrastructure, communications get affected as do power lines for example.

There are so many CMOS cameras around the world I'd be surprised if this wasn't a known problem. Especially if switched off.