ASI294mm: Significant increase in hotpixel read noise with the new driver?

ryanha

I just noticed that my images seem to have a fair amount of hot pixels type noise, more than I had remembered.

I looked back at some DARKs from november and compared to now and sure enough it is pretty different.

Is it possible that something with the new driver is causing read noise in the frames?

I put some images on DropBox:

I installed the new driver on 1/9 so anything before then is the older driver. I also thought maybe the cooling was not working so I also included a DARK with the cooler off and that was way worse so that is not the issue, but I included it for completeness.

--Ryan

Tech@ZWO

hello

please refer to this

https://astronomy-imaging-camera.com/product/asi294mm-pro

ryanha

Thanks for the note, tech@zwo. I am not sure what you are getting at with the above graph. The images that I am showing were both taken at the same gain (121) and the same exposure time (360s).

In any event, I inspected the DARKs that I took with the old driver and the new driver and they seemed to be different. The new driver actually has less SNR in the DARKs than the old one. So I re-took my DARKs with the new driver and re-calibrated and it fixed the issue.

ryanha

Oops, I realized that the images above are mis-labeled. I also see that the website down samples the images so you can't see the artifact. I put the corrected slide on dropbox (link).

--Ryan