To update you on a few aspects of the modification and it's performance here's some late breaking news items.

1. In reviewing my earliest images I have noticed that there is a slight darkening or lightening tendency at the very top of the images. I am not sure if it is still happening now since I have finished sheilding and assembling the finalized camera. It is always hard to track problems since they won't always show up reliably.
2. Sheilding the entire camera in a metal housing or at least lining other housing types with foil is very critical. Until I had even the plug port on my camera sealed up I was still getting faint bands of RF noise in my images, likely due to my monitor.
3. The best material for insulating the chip if you are cooling it is Foam-Eez. These sheets of closed cell type foam come in assorted colors as well as black (can't say as much for styrofoam) and they come in two thicknesses. It is about the same consistency as what you would find on the bottom of a mouse pad. The reason I mention this material for insulating is because last night I thought I would get rid of it and use styrofoam instead since it would insulate better. Well, maybe. But as it turned out I hurled the styrofoam in the trash after 60 seconds. The Foam-Eez is FAR easier to cut, cuts much cleaner AND leaves no bits of debris. You can find it in the crafts section at Wal-Mart.
4. It seems to be best to control antiblooming functions with an on/off switch AND a trimpot. I have "off" disconnect ABG completely and in the "on" mode I have it then wired through a 100K trimpot to dial in just thr right amount. I am going to go back to a 10K trimpot though. The reason being that even the 100K pot does not cut it off completely when I need it 100% off so it's best to rely on the switch for that and the 10K pot provides finer adjustment when I require that instead.

I don't have any sky images worth looking at right now since the mount for my Newtonian was too big to haul last time I moved. It's probably in Mexico by now since everything not nailed down in El Paso ends up over the border. Anyway, try wielding a 12" Newt in your arms in a field full of mosquitoes at night while operating a mouse AND trying to hold it steady for even a 20 second exposure. And tracking? HAH! Since I am currently living only five miles from downtown Houston there is never enough dark to even use an exposure longer than what the slider bar on the software provides. I do have a few images of things taken inside darkened rooms at night and foliage in the woods but unfortunately they are not definitive of what the camera is capable of now. The Orion Nebula or Andromeda, now those would show what it can do. You will have to wait on those a while though.

I am attaching a set of exposures taken at 254 on the slider bar in a room where the only light was from a porch light across the street with the curtains drawn (yeah, it's my own new lighting measurement standard). The first is the best image the camera can give in the uncooled mode with antiblooming still on to supress "hot" pixels and some of the static. The second and third images are taken at decreasing temperatures with the ABG still on. Notice that even at temps of 40 to 32 F the "hot" pixels are already knocked out. The final image is at -20F with ABG OFF completley (although this mode sometimes produced a single vertical white line that tries to crawl down the image). I will try to come up with something else in the next few days. At least a widefield image with lots of stars. Right now I feel like a man who owns a Ferrari and lives on an Arctic ice flow.

The difference between images one and four are pretty "nice" until you realize that the same clarity now also applies to much longer exposures. MUCH longer (can you hear me drool?).

Finally, I just realized that I need to take some dark exposures to kind of define the cameras abilities and time limits before the "hot" pixels rear their ugly heads again. I will try to get those to you tomorrow night. I would do them tonight but my other half has conspired to quite selfishly consume the precious time I could be using piddling around on my projects or sleeping.

Last night I showed off the camera to my mother. In the way that only a mother can she attacked me for spending so much money on toys. I had to explain to her that the Sony name on it was simply because I used a viewfinder as the casing for my camera. It sure does make it look snazzy though. Kind of like borrowing credence. Maybe I should hang a fake price tag on it too. $2000 should be just about enough to make my girlfriend bludgeon me to death.


Matt Herriot