Campaign of sky brightness and extinction measurements using a portable CCD camera

Variations in the sky brightness during a lunar eclipse

A total lunar eclipse is conjectured to have influence on the physical conditions of an environmental area, particularly on the brightness of the sky. The phenomenon might also be relevant on weather parameters change on Earth, such as temperature, humidity and pressure, though a straightforward correlation is not easy to establish. This work mainly aims at measuring the brightness of the sky a...

Retrieval of the optical depth using an all-sky CCD camera.

A new method is presented for retrieval of the aerosol and cloud optical depth using a CCD camera equipped with a fish-eye lens (all-sky imager system). In a first step, the proposed method retrieves the spectral radiance from sky images acquired by the all-sky imager system using a linear pseudoinverse algorithm. Then, the aerosol or cloud optical depth at 500 nm is obtained as that which mini...

Kinetic PCR Analysis Using a CCD-camera

A Review of Optical Sky Brightness and Extinction at Dome C, Antarctica

The recent discovery of exceptional seeing conditions at Dome C, Antarctica, raises the possibility of constructing an optical observatory there with unique capabilities. However, little is known from an astronomer’s perspective about the optical sky brightness and extinction at Antarctic sites. We review the contributions to sky brightness at high-latitude sites and calculate the amount of usa...

Night sky brightness at sites from DMSP-OLS satellite measurements

We apply the sky brightness modelling technique introduced and developed by Roy Garstang to high-resolution DMSP-OLS satellite measurements of upward artificial light flux and to GTOPO30 digital elevation data in order to predict the brightness distribution of the night sky at a given site in the primary astronomical photometric bands for a range of atmospheric aerosol contents. This method, ba...