Ok, here’s my silly question, I live in North East Ohio and we get very few clear nights throughout the year so I take advantage of any clear night I can. Last night was an exceptionally calm and clear night with the temperature going as low as 10 degrees F. I’ve been running SGPro for a couple of years now and have never had any issues with my equipment even when the temperature drops into the single digits. This Tuesday is going to be a different story. Supposed to be another clear night but the temperature is expected to go below 0 degrees F, something like -5.
Should I image and take the chance of something not working or wait? With it being that cold, I don’t know if the NUC computer will be able to hold up to the cold or if the USB cables might become too brittle.
I have not imaged in -5 degree weather but a year ago I was imaging here in central Texas on a night that got down to 17 degrees. I had an all-in-one type desktop PC in my observatory that was killed by the cold. Postmortem showed the memory and hard drive were fine but the motherboard was dead. I suspect the cold shrunk the motherboard and cracked some critical solder joint, killing the board.
It was replaced by a NUC. However, to be safe, I purchased an inexpensive (low heat) heating pad and a temperature controlled switch. The NUC sits on the heating pad and anytime the observatory temperature drops below 45 degrees, the heating pad comes on. It does not take much to keep the NUC from freezing.
It is important to remember that most of the computer hardware we use is designed to operate in the typical office / computer room environment – not at the extreme cold conditions that can occur in our observatories. Even just sitting (not running), the PC is subjected to the cold temperatures so even if you decide not to image, the PC could be at risk.
Now, having said all this, many of the other imagers in my dark sky site operation use their PCs in the cold conditions without any problems. So, the effect of the cold is clearly equipment vendor specific.
That is an good idea with using a heating pad. would you happen to have the information on the heating pad you used and the controller? Might be something to add. When I have my observatory closed I keep it heated to about 45F. I have it fully insulated. but when open the equipment is exposed to the outside temperature.
So far my NUC hasn’t experienced any issues with the cold yet even in the single digit degrees range but I’m sure at some point the cold might.
The heating pad was purchased at a local “Dollar Store” – it cost $12. It is a simple unit with just an on-off switch. What I found was that all the more expensive heating pads had timers that would automatically shut off the heating pad after some short period of time and that time period automatically reverted to 20 minutes or so on a power cycle. So, not good for my intended use.
I often image in temps down to 0. Works fine for me. My obs is not ever heated, but the pc is in the lower floor so not directly exposed to the coldest temps of the night.