Optical Night-Sky Brightness at Mauna Kea over the Course of a Complete Sunspot Cycle

Krisciunas, K.

doi:10.1086/133993

Cited by 49 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Since the source of sky brightness is mostly within the earth's atmosphere, we removed our 0.17 mag air mass À1 extinction correction for our images around new moon and found that the average brightness of the night sky at zenith near new moon was approximately v ¼ 21:78. This is in good agreement with the measurements of Krisciunas (1997), who found a surface brightness of 21:77 AE 0:12 at approximately the same time in the solar cycle (2 yr past the solar maximum).…”

Section: Data Reductionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Deep CCD Surface Photometry of Galaxy Clusters. II. Searching for Intracluster Starlight in Non‐cD clusters

Feldmeier¹,

Mihos²,

Morrison³

et al. 2004

ApJ

132

150

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We report the search for intracluster light in four Abell type II-III (non-cD) galaxy clusters: A801, A1234, A1553, and A1914. We find that on average these clusters contain $10% of their detected stellar luminosity in a diffuse component. We show that for two of the clusters the intracluster light closely follows the galaxy distribution, but in the other two cases, there are noticeable differences between the spatial distribution of the galaxies and the intracluster light. We report the results of a search for intracluster tidal debris in each cluster and note that A1914 in particular has a number of strong tidal features likely due to its status as a recent cluster merger. One of the A1914 features appears to be spatially coincident with an extension seen in weak lensing maps, implying that the feature traces a large amount of mass. We compare these results with numerical simulations of hierarchically formed galaxy clusters and find good general agreement between the observed and simulated images, although we also find that our observations sample only the brightest features of the intracluster light. Together, these results suggest that intracluster light can be a valuable tool in determining the evolutionary state of galaxy clusters.

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Section: Data Reductionsupporting

confidence: 92%

Deep CCD Surface Photometry of Galaxy Clusters. II. Searching for Intracluster Starlight in Non‐cD clusters

Feldmeier¹,

Mihos²,

Morrison³

et al. 2004

ApJ

132

150

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Krisciunas (1997) notes that, on average, the zenith sky brightness over Mauna Kea shows a not very convincing sky brightness change of 0.03 mag hour −1 . On the other hand he also reports cases where the darkening rate was as large as 0.24 mag hour −1 and discusses the possibility of a reverse Walker effect taking place during a few hours before the beginning of morning twilight.…”

Section: Sky Brightness Variations During the Nightmentioning

confidence: 99%

UBVRInight sky brightness during sunspot maximum at ESO-Paranal

Patat

2003

A&A

119

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Abstract. In this paper we present and discuss for the first time a large data set of UBVRI night sky brightness measurements collected at ESO-Paranal from April 2000 to September 2001. A total of about 3900 images obtained on 174 different nights with FORS1 were analysed using an automatic algorithm specifically designed for this purpose. This led to the construction of an unprecedented database that allowed us to study in detail a number of effects such as differential zodiacal light contamination, airmass dependency, daily solar activity and moonlight contribution. Particular care was devoted to the investigation of short time scale variations and micro-auroral events. The typical dark time night sky brightness values found for Paranal are similar to those reported for other astronomical dark sites at a similar solar cycle phase. The zenith-corrected values averaged over the whole period are 22.3, 22.6, 21.6 20.9 and 19.7 mag arcsec −2 in U, B, V, R and I respectively. In particular, there is no evidence of light pollution either in the broadband photometry or in the high-airmass spectra we have analysed. Finally, possible applications for the exposure time calculators are discussed.

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“…Rayleigh (1928) and Rayleigh & Jones (1935) were the first to note a correlation between the sky brightness and the 11 year solar cycle. This is due to the airglow being brighter at solar maximum and fainter at solar minimum (Krisciunas 1997;Krisciunas et al 2007). The 10.7 cm radio flux of the Sun is widely used as an index of solar activity.…”

Section: Sources Of Sky Brightnessmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optical Sky Brightness and Transparency during the Winter Season at Dome A Antarctica from the Gattini-All-Sky Camera

Yang

Moore

Krisciunas

et al. 2017

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The summit of the Antarctic plateau, Dome A, is proving to be an excellent site for optical, near-infrared, and terahertz astronomical observations. Gattini is a wide-field camera installed on the PLATO instrument module as part of the Chinese-led traverse to Dome A in 2009 January. We present here the measurements of sky brightness with the Gattini ultra-large field of view ( ´ 90 90 ) 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 during the year 2009 with minimum aurora, and they are comparable to the faintest sky brightness at Maunakea 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.

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Optical Night-Sky Brightness at Mauna Kea over the Course of a Complete Sunspot Cycle

Cited by 49 publications

References 15 publications

Deep CCD Surface Photometry of Galaxy Clusters. II. Searching for Intracluster Starlight in Non‐cD clusters

Deep CCD Surface Photometry of Galaxy Clusters. II. Searching for Intracluster Starlight in Non‐cD clusters

UBVRInight sky brightness during sunspot maximum at ESO-Paranal

Optical Sky Brightness and Transparency during the Winter Season at Dome A Antarctica from the Gattini-All-Sky Camera

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