NEID first light

[notFritzArgelander]

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-astronomi ... anets.html

[Lady Fraktor]

Interesting that it needs to be kept so warm, I thought they normally cooled them so the waste heat did not generate extra noise while imaging.

[helicon]

80 degrees F?
I'm excited about the possibilities of this new instrument, seems like it will be better than what already have as far as finding earth-sized planets. Thanks for posting notFritz...

[notFritzArgelander]

Interesting that it needs to be kept so warm, I thought they normally cooled them so the waste heat did not generate extra noise while imaging.

80 degrees F?
I'm excited about the possibilities of this new instrument, seems like it will be better than what already have as far as finding earth-sized planets. Thanks for posting notFritz...

My reading of the article is that they are thermal stabilizing the entire instrument, not just the CCD detector. So the temperature control has more to do with the dispersing element, optics, and optical paths including the fiber optics assembly. Those are the things that need to be kept stable to assure the high precision of the radial velocity measurements. I think they would be free to separately fix the temperature of the detector as they wanted to get the signal/noise ratio desired. But for precision Doppler shifts it's the rest of the spectrograph that needs stabilizing at an easily attainable temperature.

I looked for details of the thermal design but only found these links:

https://neid.psu.edu/2018/06/27/the-nei ... ber-train/
https://neid.psu.edu/what-is-neid/

[Lady Fraktor]

Thank you nFA