I've posted this at the equipment forum but thought some on here may be interested too?
I was just testing in the lounge to see if a new USB-serial adapter for my mount control was working and that some driver updating I had done recently wasn't interfering with my CCD systems and I decided to test the cooling capabilities of my FLI ProLine 11002 CCD camera in the hot weather.
I have always used -35C as my chip temp and thought.. I wonder if I can reach that today? A digital thermometer on our wall aircon controller read 27degC (we run it modestly to conserve energy) so I set the chip temp in Astroart at -35 and sat back and watched to see if it could do it. Over the course of a couple'a min I watched as the cooling pured and slamed that temp down pretty fast to about -30. At this point it slowed and operating at 99-100% cooling capacity it struggled on but after about 5-6min eventually the chip temp stopped dropping and stabilised on an amazing -34.7C
This means the delta cooling was 61.7C from ambient or in other words I can realistically (running at just under 100% cooling capacity) image at -35C on any night where the temp isn't more than about 26C.
In this heat, that's pretty handy
Just thought some might find this interesting
Mike