Winter sky brightness and cloud cover at Dome A, Antarctica Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • AbstractAt the summit of the Antarctic plateau, Dome A offers an intriguing location for future large scale optical astronomical observatories. The Gattini Dome A project was created to measure the optical sky brightness and large area cloud cover of the winter-time sky above this high altitude Antarctic site. The wide field camera and multi-filter system was installed on the PLATO instrument module as part of the Chinese-led traverse to Dome A in January 2008. This automated wide field camera consists of an Apogee U4000 interline CCD coupled to a Nikon fisheye lens enclosed in a heated container with glass window. The system contains a filter mechanism providing a suite of standard astronomical photometric filters (Bessell B, V, R) and a long-pass red filter for the detection and monitoring of airglow emission. The system operated continuously throughout the 2009, and 2011 winter seasons and part-way through the 2010 season, recording long exposure images sequentially for each filter. We have in hand one complete winter-time dataset (2009) returned via a manned traverse. We present here the first measurements of sky brightness in the photometric V band, cloud cover statistics measured so far and an estimate of the extinction.

published proceedings

  • Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union

author list (cited authors)

  • Moore, A. M., Yang, Y. i., Fu, J., Ashley, M., Cui, X., Feng, L. L., ... Zhu, Z.

citation count

  • 4

complete list of authors

  • Moore, Anna M||Yang, Yi||Fu, Jianning||Ashley, Michael CB||Cui, Xiangqun||Feng, Long Long||Gong, Xuefei||Hu, Zhongwen||Lawrence, Jon S||Luong-Van, Daniel M||Riddle, Reed||Shang, Zhaohui||Sims, Geoff||Storey, John WV||Tothill, Nicholas FH||Travouillon, Tony||Wang, Lifan||Yang, Huigen||Yang, Ji||Zhou, Xu||Zhu, Zhenxi

publication date

  • August 2012