Giving Up for the Night

[Tom Droege <droege@wwa.com>]

Great progress.  I think we almost have a camera.  I will have to figure
out how to cool it just a little more.  Probably use an old refrigreator
and a water tank to rout the cooling water through.  About 10 C cooling
water should do it.
A little pink foam around the CCD and it got just enough colder so that I
could make longer measurements.    

I keep trying to do the experiment of making various length dark frames to
try to extrapolate back to a zero length exposure.  I almost had it done.
But I keep finding sources of noise pick up.  AC noise tends to give three
peaks on a distribution.  "Image Scientist" turns out to be a useful tool
to hunt for noise.  I keep turning off lights and unplugging soldering
irons and grounding things and the noise keeps going down.  So I never get
the experiment done.  The electronics is spread all over the work bench,
and is not in a shield box.  Not the way to do low noise work. 

But folks, there is no doubt, we are going to have a camera good enough for
the job.

Tom Droege