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Chapter 3 First Light 35
Detector Temperature (Setup|Detector Temperature…): -40°C for
air-cooled. When the array temperature reaches the set temperature, the green
Temp Lock LED on the rear of the ST-133 will light and there will be a
locked indication at the computer monitor. Note that some overshoot may
occur. This could cause temperature lock to be briefly lost and then quickly re-
established. If you are reading the actual temperature reported by the application
software, there may be a small difference between the set and reported
temperature when lock is established. This is normal and does not indicate a
system malfunction. Once lock is established, the temperature will be stable to
within ±0.05°C.
Interface tab page (Setup|Hardware): High Speed PCI (or PCI(Timer))
Note: This tab page is not available if you are using the USB 2.0 interface.
Cleans and Skips tab page (Setup|Hardware): Default
Experiment Setup Main tab page (Acquisition|Experiment Setup…):
• Exposure Time: 100 ms
• Accumulations & Number of Images: 1
Experiment Setup ROI tab page (Acquisition|Experiment Setup…): Use
this function to define the region of interest (ROI).
• Spectroscopy Mode: Selected
• Clicking on Full loads the full size of the chip into the edit boxes.
Experiment Setup Timing tab page (Acquisition|Experiment Setup…):
• Timing Mode: Free Run
• Shutter Control: Normal
• Safe Mode vs. Fast Mode: Safe
Focusing
The mounting hardware provides two degrees of freedom, focus and rotation. In this
context, focus means to physically move the detector back and forth through the focal
plane of the spectrograph. The approach taken is to slowly move the detector in and out
of focus and adjust for optimum while watching a live display on the monitor, followed
by rotating the detector and again adjusting for optimum. The following procedure,
which describes the focusing operation with an Acton 300I spectrograph, can be easily
adapted to other spectrographs.
1. Mount a light source such as a mercury pen-ray type in front of the entrance slit of
the spectrograph. Any light source with line output can be used. Standard fluorescent
overhead lamps have good calibration lines as well. If there are no "line" sources
available, it is possible to use a broadband source such as tungsten for the alignment.
If this is the case, use a wavelength setting of 0.0 nm for alignment purposes.
2. With the spectrograph properly connected to the controller, turn the power on, wait
for the spectrograph to initialize. Then set it to 435.8 nm if using a mercury lamp or
to 0.0 nm if using a broadband source.