I bought this DSI II recently, with the idea in mind of using it for planetary work but it seemed to me to a lot noisier than it's press would suggest. SO I decided to do this mod:
http://astromodifications.blogspot.c...some-text.html
It's a bit of a leap to take the angle grinder to the back of the camera but it worked out pretty much as it should. I took the peltier and heatsink out of the chinese (supposedly 60 watt but only in someone's dreams) peltier assembly I had bought for my 350D but decided not to use. The best I could get was about 10C using it that way. SO I ditched the cooler side heatsink and fan and attached the peltier to the back of the DSI directly. Also put a small temperature probe inside the DSI.
Time to fire it up. Ambient was 28.3C. I didn't run the camara for this test. I really wanted to see how the peltier would work in this configuration. Bottom line is it's didn't work a whole lot better.
I ran it for 20 minutes and managed to hit equilibrium at about 11C below ambient.
I should be reasonably happy with that I suppose since that means I have reduced thermal noise by about 85% (using the 5C rule). The next test will be with some darks.
But that's it so far. Here's the graph from this first run.
Peter