An atmospheric radiation model for Cerro Paranal - I. The optical spectral range
By Stefan Noll, W. Kausch, M. Barden, A. Jones, C. Szyszka, Stefan Kimeswenger, J. Vinther. 2012
242 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Aims. The Earth’s atmosphere affects ground-based astronomical observations. Scattering , absorption, and radiation processes deteriorate the signal-to-noise ratio of the data received. For scheduling astronomical observations it is, therefore, im portant to accurately estimate the wavelength-dependent effect of the Earth’s atmosphere on the observed flux. Methods. In order to increase the accuracy of the exposure time calcul ator of the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Larg e Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal, an atmospheric model was developed as part of the Austrian ESO In-Kind contribution. It includes all relevant components, such as scattered moonlight, scat tered starlight, zodiacal light, atmospheric thermal radi ation and absorption, and non-thermal airglow emission. This paper focuses on atmospheric scattering processes that mostly affect the blue ( 0.55� m) wavelength regime. While the former is mainly investigated by means of radiative transfe r models, the intensity and variability of the latter is stud ied with a sample of 1186 VLT FORS 1 spectra. Results. For a set of parameters such as the object altitude angle, Moon-object angular distance, ecliptic latitude, bimonthly p eriod, and solar radio flux, our model predicts atmospheric radiati on and transmission at a requested resolution. A comparison of our model with the FORS 1 spectra and photometric data for the night-sky brightness from the literature, suggest a model accuracy o f about 20%. This is a significant improvement with respect to existing pr edictive atmospheric models for astronomical exposure time calculators.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change, Spectroscopy
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51e735fde0fc4b587e5d6cf42a93831a04dabaff
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Citations in the corpus
- Survey Operations for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (2023, background): “It is therefore likely that sky brightness distribution observed so far is darker than what we will have for the remainder of the survey (Walker 1988; Patat 2008; Noll et al. 2012).”
- First light of the VLT planet finder SPHERE - III. New spectrophotometry and astrometry of the HR 8799 exoplanetary system (2015, methodology): “NAME=SKYCALC. of the components of HD 1160 in the IRDIS passbands (Table 8) from the definition of the passbands in Vigan et al. (2016).”
- An advanced scattered moonlight model for Cerro Paranal (2013, methodology): “Our optical sky background model, but with an older version of the scattered moonlight model, is described in Noll et al. (2012).”
- Molecfit: A general tool for telluric absorption correction - I. Method and application to ESO instruments (2015, methodology): “The tool is able to fit sky emission spectra for molecules and physical processes handled by the radiative transfer code, with the exclusion of lines produced by chemiluminescence (such as OH, see, e.g., Noll et al. (2012)).”
- Molecfit: A general tool for telluric absorption correction - II. Quantitative evaluation on ESO-VLT/X-Shooterspectra (2015, methodology): “…community; (iii) incorporates a code-optimised and upto-date line list; and (iv) comprises broader functionality (e.g., UV/optical ozone absorption, which was needed in a parallel project Noll et al. 2012) and performs significantly faster for most spectral ranges for similar or better precision.”
- GRB hosts through cosmic time - VLT/X-Shooter emission-line spectroscopy of 96 γ-ray-burst-selected galaxies at 0.1 (2015, methodology): “Finally, a synthetic Paranal sky radiance and transmission spectrum (Noll et al. 2012) was used to flag regions of telluric absorption and sky emission, and affected data were automatically discarded from the line fit (Fig.”
- Atmospheric characterization of Proxima b by coupling the Sphere high-contrast imager to the Espresso spectrograph (2016, methodology): “In fact, ESO VLT is one of the very few 10-m class facilities in the world that offer an extreme AO system and a high-resolution spectrograph on the same telescope.”