Back few weeks ago, during one of the heatwaves (can’t remember which one), I was wasting away my time trying to capture some portion of Cygnus nebulosity with one of my rigs, this one equipped with an IMX571 color sensor. For some reason I can’t recall (did I forget, did the bugger threw a fit?) the camera cooling wasn’t turned on and soon enough the sensor reached a temperature of around 35C and went on capturing away for about 2.5 hours (that’s how much I get on nautical twilight where I live at that time of the year) and me utterly oblivious of it. Come today and processing the data I found out both that the cooling didn’t start (for whatever reason) and I don’t actually have a master dark for this rather high temperature. The highest I can get is 20C. Should I try to replicate that high temperature or trying to make do with what I have (with dark optimization turned on). The effect of the thermal noise is pretty stark at those temperatures and the thermal dark current is pretty high too and so is the noise level.