Optical Sky Brightness and Transparency During the Winter Season at Dome A Antarctica From the Gattini-Allsky Camera

التفاصيل البيبلوغرافية
العنوان: Optical Sky Brightness and Transparency During the Winter Season at Dome A Antarctica From the Gattini-Allsky Camera
المؤلفون: Yang, Yi, Moore, Anna M., Krisciunas, Kevin, Wang, Lifan, Ashley, Michael C. B., Fu, Jianning, Brown, Peter J., Cui, Xiangqun, Feng, Long-Long, Gong, Xuefei, Hu, Zhongwen, Lawrence, Jon S., Luong-Van, Daniel, Riddle, Reed L., Shang, Zhaohui, Sims, Geoff, Storey, John W. V., Suntzeff, Nicholas B., Tothill, Nick, Travouillon, Tony, Yang, Huigen, Yang, Ji, Zhou, Xu, Zhu, Zhenxi
سنة النشر: 2016
المجموعة: Astrophysics
مصطلحات موضوعية: Astrophysics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, Astrophysics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
الوصف: The summit of the Antarctic plateau, Dome A, is proving to be an excellent site for optical, NIR, and THz astronomical observations. GATTINI was a wide-field camera installed on the PLATO instrument module as part of the Chinese-led traverse to Dome A in January, 2009. We present here the measurements of sky brightness with the Gattini ultra-large field of view (90 deg x 90 deg) in the photometric B-, V-, and R-bands, cloud cover statistics measured during the 2009 winter season, and an estimate of the sky transparency. A cumulative probability distribution indicates that the darkest 10% of the nights at Dome A have sky brightness of S_B = 22.98, S_V = 21.86, and S_R = 21.68 mag arcsec^{-2}. These values were obtained around the year 2009 with minimum aurora, and they are comparable to the faintest sky brightness at Mauna Kea and the best sites of northern Chile. Since every filter includes strong auroral lines that effectively contaminate the sky brightness measurements, for instruments working around the auroral lines, either with custom filters or with high spectral resolution instruments, these values could be easily obtained on a more routine basis. In addition, we present example light curves for bright targets to emphasize the unprecedented observational window function available from this ground-based site. These light curves will be published in a future paper.
Comment: 36 pages, 18 figure, submitted to AJ
نوع الوثيقة: Working Paper
DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/aa73dc
URL الوصول: http://arxiv.org/abs/1610.10094
رقم الأكسشن: edsarx.1610.10094
قاعدة البيانات: arXiv
الوصف
DOI:10.3847/1538-3881/aa73dc