Overview & Cooling

The Santa Barbara ST-7E is a 765x510 pixel CCD camera that is controlled via a parallel connection to a computer and the software CCDOps. Due to the outdated nature of parallel connections, the computer used is a Sony Vaio. The CCD is capable of cooling to 30ºC below ambient temperature. It is advantageous, however, to select a temperature that you know should always be reachable regardless of the observing night. This way you can characterise the thermal noise at that temperature once and apply corrections to all frames taken.
It was found that -5ºC was a suitable temperature for both obtaining on warmer nights and low levels of dark current.

The CCD chip in the ST-7E is a Kodak KAF0401E, with Anti-Blooming Gate (ABG) protection and 60% quantum efficiency in the red band.

For full specifications see the user guide on the Literature page.