AST 311 ST-I CCD lab reports

Students - I wanted to congratulate most of you on successfully and ACCURATELY measuring the ST-I dark current!

Most of you reported values in your lab reports in the range of 0.5-1 counts / pixel / second.

Indeed, if you go to the website documenting the camera, the manufacturers report:

https://www.sbig.com/products/cameras/specialty/st-i/st-i-monochrome/

a dark current of 0.5 e-/p/s (or electrons per pixel per second).

And they report a gain of: 0.5e-/count

So, you were all within a factor of 2 of the real dark current value cited, and this kind of variabiity you individually observed with your cameras is probably real (and also affected by statistics).

See, science, it works!

- Dr Plavchan