Thomas Juerges wrote:
Dear David,

On Tue, 02 Mar 2004 20:11:34 +0000, David Whysong wrote:

That's not read noise, it must be the bias level. You can subtract it off
relatively cleanly.

Hmm, from the user's point of view one cannot determine if it is really
bias, i.e. due to too low pre biasing the pixel cells in order to remove
noise or if it is real read out noise. Please correct if I'm wrong.

Anyway, the performance is ok but the "bias/readout" noise.

Ok, maybe I'm confused...

If you take two short ( 1 second) exposures, then subtract one from the
other, what is the RMS of the resulting image?

It should be something of order 10; if it's more like 4000, then something
is very wrong with your camera.

After next week I'll upload the final source code release for our
telescope project. The software is integrated into the ACS (ALMA Common
Software, a kind of abstraction and expansion of ACE & TAO) but it should
be an easy job for a programer to grab the main things from it. I'm using
the latest SBIG developer libraries, so that the (hopefully soon arriving)
STL should run flawlessly. But... I have not integrated the filterwheel
yet. This is scheduled for 3rd quarter this year.

Thanks for the link! I had a look at the SBIG library, the STL cameras have
a very high level filter wheel interface so programming that should be easy
compared to (for example) autoguiding. Anyway I'll definitely have a look
at your software when it's posted, thanks.

Dave

David Whysong
DWhysong (at) physics (dot) ucsb (dot) edu