Cincinnati Status Report - Jan 06, 2002

["Michael Gutzwiller" <deepsky@fuse.net>]

Most of my work lately has been writing my own Mark IV control software.  As
I've mentioned before the software will run under Windows 98.  The software
should also run under Windows ME but I've not tested it there.  It will not
run under Windows 2000 or XP since I would need to create a driver for those
systems and that's too much work.

The preliminary version of the software will now perform all necessary
operations.  The latest additions have been:
* Adding ADC polling.
* Adding DAC control. I was very careful there to avoid setting the wrong
CCD voltages!
* Adding image control.  Image control includes exposures, reading the CCD
and saving the images to FITS files.
* Modifying the Stamp communications to use asynchronous I/O.  This makes it
easier to recover from communication timeouts.

As part of the debugging process I've taken some bias images with good
results.  The readout error (1 sigma) for the two cameras was 5.0 and 5.7
ADU's which is equivalent to 12.5 and 14.2 electrons respectively.  This is
certainly well below the error that the background sky will produce at my
site.  I have noticed that there are subtle patterns in the bias images at
the level of 2 ADU's.  I am at a loss to explain these patterns, they may be
interference induced.  At any rate they're in the noise.

Mike G.