This past week the HPF instrument team has been working on the detector hardware. Over the past few years the bias/pedestal level has been slowly rising and recent exceeded 40k counts (of a total 65k available to the A/D converter). This high pedestal had begun impacting our ability to observe bright targets without saturation. The graph below shows the gradual rise of this pedestal level since 2019, and the rapid drop achieved this week during the detector maintenance. While the underlying cause of the pedestal rise is unknown, we anticipate that HPF will return to normal science observations in the coming days.
