An advanced scattered moonlight model for Cerro Paranal
By Amy M. Jones, S. Noll, W. Kausch, C. Szyszka, Stefan Kimeswenger. 2013
166 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The largest natural source of light at night is the Moon, and it is the major contributor to the astronomical sky background. Being able to accurately predict the sky background, including scattered moonlight is important for scheduling astronomical observations. We have developed an improved scattered moonlight model, in which the components are computed with a better physical understanding as opposed to the simple empirical fit in the frequently used photometric model of Krisciunas & Schaefer (1991, PASP, 103, 1033). Our spectroscopic model can better trace the spectral trends of scattered moonlight for any position of the Moon and target observation. This is the first scattered moonlight model that we know of which is this physical and versatile. We have incorporated an observed solar spectrum, accurate lunar albedo fit, and elaborate scattering and absorption calculations that include scattering off of molecules and aerosols. It was designed for Cerro Paranal, but can be modified for any location with known atmospheric properties. Throughout the optical range, the uncertainty is less than 20%. This advanced scattered moonlight model can predict the amount of scattered moonlight for any given geometry of the Moon and target, and lunar phase for the entire optical spectrum.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Biomedical Engineering, Instrumentation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e122ebbc0bc8d2ac7c71bff7423a9759601fca1
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Astronomy and Astrophysics
In Biomedical Engineering
In Instrumentation
Citations in the corpus
- First light of the VLT planet finder SPHERE - III. New spectrophotometry and astrometry of the HR 8799 exoplanetary system (2015, methodology): “We investigated the effect of the atmospheric extinction using the sky simulator4 SKYCALC (Noll et al. 2012; Jones et al. 2013) and found it to be negligible.”
- Atmospheric characterization of Proxima b by coupling the Sphere high-contrast imager to the Espresso spectrograph (2016, methodology): “We proceed based on the very detailed Cerro Paranal Sky Model developed at ESO (Noll et al. 2012; Jones et al. 2013), which includes contributions from telluric emission lines, scattered moonlight, scattered star light, zodiacal light, and airglow continuum.”