Optical sky brightness at Dome A, Antarctica, from the Nigel experiment Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • Nigel is a fiber-fed UV/visible grating spectrograph with a thermoelectrically-cooled 2561024 pixel CCD camera, designed to measure the twilight and night sky brightness from 300nm to 850 nm. Nigel has three pairs of fibers, each with a field-of-view with an angular diameter of 25 degrees, pointing in three fixed positions towards the sky. The bare fibers are exposed to the sky with no additional optics. The instrument was deployed at Dome A, Antarctica in January 2009 as part of the PLATO (PLATeau Observatory) robotic observatory. During the 2009 winter, Nigel made approximately six months of continuous observations of the sky, with typically 104 deadtime between exposures. The resulting spectra provide quantitative information on the sky brightness, the auroral contribution, and the water vapour content of the atmosphere. We present details of the design, construction and calibration of the Nigel spectrometer, as well some sample spectra from a preliminary analysis. 2010 SPIE.

name of conference

  • Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes III

published proceedings

  • GROUND-BASED AND AIRBORNE TELESCOPES III

author list (cited authors)

  • Sims, G., Ashley, M., Cui, X., Everett, J. R., Feng, L., Gong, X., ... Zhu, Z.

citation count

  • 6

complete list of authors

  • Sims, Geoff||Ashley, Michael CB||Cui, Xiangqun||Everett, Jon R||Feng, LongLong||Gong, Xuefei||Hengst, Shane||Hu, Zhongwen||Lawrence, Jon S||Luong-van, Daniel M||Shang, Zhaohui||Storey, John WV||Wang, Lifan||Yang, Huigen||Yang, Ji||Zhou, Xu||Zhu, Zhenxi

editor list (cited editors)

  • Stepp, L. M., Gilmozzi, R., & Hall, H. J.

publication date

  • July 2010