May I ask for a consideration of an additional feature in equipment profile and control panel, to allow cooling the camera by configurable steps?
There are frozen issues on the optical window of the camera encountered especially in humid location, allowing a configurable cooling by steps shall help.
Thank you very much for your consideration.
how would that be different from lengthing the cool-down time to 30 minutes in your example?
I manually do it by breaking it down into 3-4 steps, and can avoid the froze, but cannot in one go even lengthening the duration.
I’m not seeing how the steps would be different than cooling down in a certain number of minutes, which SGP already supports. Once you get close to or below the dew point you’re going to start to get dew and eventually frost if your camera doesn’t have a heated window or the heated window can’t keep up with the cooler. Maybe cooling down slower is the option?
If you cool slower does the issue go away? Like -10 in 30 mins?
Jared
Hi Jared,
I am having mobile setup, which I could not lengthen the cooling time too much, e.g. for an hour, due to the airtime allowed for collecting photons.
The heater is already turned on, but it doesn’t help. Our suburban where we do astrophotography is quite humid, which we are combating with.
I tried lengthening the cooling time, but found frost appeared even around 4C, especially when the humidity is high.
I found I first cool the camera to around 5C, when the temperature is reached, let it stabilizes for a while, and then do another stage to 0C, let it stabilizes again for a while, and then set it to cool to subzero.
The sensitive range I found is around 5C to 0C. Once it becomes stabilized, I can cool it further to the desired temperature.
Practically, I found this way can help to minimize the chance of getting frost on the optical window, but I have to do it manually in SGP.
During the cooling and stabilization at around 5C to 0C, I can leverage the time by SGP for sky flat, center to target and autofocus, before capturing the lights.
That’s why I would like the development team to consider, a minor feature with cooling by configurable stages to be added into SGP, to see if this manual operation can be further automated.
Thank you.
It’s interesting that you have to cool in stages. Have you discussed this with the camera manufacture? It’s possible its cooling isn’t working as designed.
Another thing to try is baking the desiccant to remove all moisture, or buying a new one.
