We have designed, constructed, and put into operation a very large area CCD camera that covers the field of view of the 1.2 m Samuel Oschin Schmidt Telescope at the Palomar Observatory. The camera consists of 112 CCDs arranged in a mosaic of four rows with 28 CCDs each. The CCDs are pixel Sarnoff 600 # 2400 thinned, back-illuminated devices with pixels. The camera covers an area of on the 13 mm...

The shape of water-leaving reflectance spectra in the near infrared range 700-900nm is almost invariant for turbid waters and has been analysed and tabulated as a similarity spectrum by normalisation at 780nm. This similarity spectrum is used here for the quality control of seaborne reflectance measurements and for the improvement of sky glint correction. Estimates of the reflectance measuremen...

The Antarctic plateau provides the best terrestrial sites for infrared and sub millimetre astronomy In this paper we examine the relative importance of temperature aerosol content and precipitable water vapour to determine which parameters have the greatest in uence on atmospheric transmission and sky brightness We use the atmospheric modelling program MODTRAN to model the observed sky spectrum...

Different parameters influence the results of infrared measurements of temperature. The emissivity of the surface under consideration as well as the temperature of the ambient elements may be specified among these parameters. Convective and radiative heat transfer takes place between thermal pipelines and its surrounding. In the case of low temperature of the sky, the radiation heat exchange is...

A lossy compression algorithm is presented for astronomical images that protects photometric integrity for detected point sources at a user-defined level of statistical tolerance. PHOTZIP works by modeling, smoothing, and then compressing the astronomical background behind self-detected point sources, while completely preserving values in and around those sources. The algorithm also guaranties ...

Thermopile pyranometers exhibit IR radiative losses that affect global and diffuse shortwave measurements made with first class thermopile based instruments. Pyrgeometers can be used to measure the sky temperature and are used to calculate the pyranometer’s IR radiative losses. Few solar monitoring sites are equipped with pyrgeometers necessary to account for the IR radiative losses associated ...

Variability of photovoltaic (PV) power output is a potential concern to utilities because it can lead to voltage changes on the distribution system and have other adverse impacts on power quality unless additional equipment is added or operational practices are changed to mitigate these effects. This paper develops and evaluates a simple yet novel approach for quantifying irradiance variability...

The Aladin interactive sky atlas, developed at CDS, is a service providing simultaneous access to digitized images of the sky, astronomical catalogues, and databases. The driving motivation is to facilitate direct, visual comparison of observational data at any wavelength with images of the optical sky, and with reference catalogues. The set of available sky images consists of the STScI Digitiz...

Urban morphology, including buildings’ typology and their configuration, affects sky view factor and insolation, which are two of the most influential parameters in urban microclimate. These become even more important in extreme environmental conditions. In this research, challenge was to generate various rule based urban morphologies in a parametric environment. Then, to evaluate them based on...