High Humidity and More Frosting Issues.

Last night I went out to Kumeu Observatory around 7 pm, Steve wasn't free so I set about testing out the camera in the hopes that by cooking the desiccant I would have solved our frosting problems, unfortunately as I cooled down the camera I saw halos start to develop around the stars and after just ten or so minutes I started to see the tell tale signs of frost starting to form, while I was working in the observatory I had set up my DSLR outside to capture a startrail and after going over the images today I noticed quite a bit of thin cloud that was invisible to the naked eye but was clearly captured by the camera, so maybe some of the halos I was seeing may have been caused by the clouds although the tell tale signs of frosting are really quite distinctive and can't really be mistaken for anything else.

Halos around the stars after cooling down the CCD ^

The problem with the halos must have been in camera though because when I warmed up the camera the halos all went away and when I cooled down the camera they quickly came back, I had read online that after cooking the desiccant it may take a day or two for the desiccant to absorb all the moisture from the camera so maybe there just hasn't been enough time for the desiccant to do it's job or perhaps it's time to buy a new desiccant, we can't really do anything below zero degrees Celsius at the moment as you start to develop the halos below that temperature and once you have the halos they tend to effect being able to obtain good focus, I noticed that the weather station was reporting that the humidity was at 90% so I think this may have been a factor also, when I shut down the dome later on in the night the shutter was literally dripping wet! I also did some tests of running the camera at zero degrees Celsius for an hour or so and then cooling it down as me and Steve had read that in an online forum as being a possible solution to the problem but to no avail as soon as the camera was set to -20 you would see the halos start to form followed by frost in the 5-10 minutes after cool down, we will have to find a solution to our frosting issues quickly as the microlensing season is fast approaching.

Startrail looking south over the Wasp Observatory that I took while working in Kumeu Observatory. ^

I stuck it out until 2 am doing some pointing tests by astrometricaly solving images with the Image Link function in the Sky X, using this technique I could easily find variable stars such as AR Sco, so we will probably just use this method until we can get a really robust pointing model done, by 2 am the clouds had inevitably rolled in and put an end to the nights observations.

Posted by Jonathan Green.