From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: August 13, 2005 12:23:14 PM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Re: Cooled Flea Camera Shots

Hi Tim;

On 13-Aug-05, at 9:13 AM, Tim wrote:

Something I'm wondering about here...

Does adding a cooler to a camera that doesn't already have one introduce thermal stresses

to the internal components (the ccd and the electronics) that might damage them over

time? Could a less agressive cooling system work well enough (like putting heatsinks on

the sides of the case with a fan or two blowing across them)?

Unless your freezing the camera very rapidly (like instantaneous as would be if you immerse the camera in liquid oxygen / co2 etc.), it is going to make basically zero difference. In fact some cooling of the electronics will prolong the life of your camera, as your not allowing it to get as hot as it normally would - and the Flea cameras can be very warm as the pack a a lot of electronics into a very small 1.25" sealed cube weighing less than 1 ounce.

And the Astro cameras (ie SBig, Xpress etc.) are not designed to push a lot of continuous data, therefore they don't get nearly as warm as FireWire camera operating at say 120 fps..

Reason I'm asking is that I just looked at Steve Mogg's website at the "outback" cooler for

Meade DSI cameras, and the instructions warn that the fan should be left on after the

Peltier cooler is turned off, so as not to overheat the ccd as the heat from the heatsink

conducts back through the system after it's powered down.

That's because the peltier cooler itself has a lot of latent heat on the hot side, and when you turn off the heat pump, the entire device heats up. So leaving the fan running afterwards will keep extracting heat from the hot side and the peltier unit will cool off quicker and not heat up the camera.

HTH..

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta Canada T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com