Dewars are used to mount the detectors during operation, providing a cooling mechanism as well as mechanical support.  We use liquid nitrogen dewars on our science grade cameras at the telescopes, but also have a closed cycle refrigerated dewar in the Lab and thermoelectric dewars for guider applications.

Typical Lab dewar setup, minus the CCD.  The green card is a generic printed circuit board which is tailored using wire wrap for a specific device.  The Fe-55 X-ray source can be seen on the right side.

Our oldest dewars were built in-house while our current generation dewars are purchased from Infrared Laboratories, Kadel Engineering, or Universal Cryogenics.  We customize all our dewars for the specific detector and controller configuration.

For our laboratory testing, we have built a modular system in our four test dewars which use common I/O schemes to wire all devices.  We are able to mount any device in any dewar in just a few minutes.  The dewars include internal pneumatically controlled Fe-55 X-ray sources which allow gain and noise calibration without operator intervention.

 Lee makes some modifications to one of the testing dewars.