Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.1127z&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #11.27; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.748
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
ALE (Astronomical LIDAR for Extinction) is deployed at the University of New Mexico's (UNM) Campus Observatory in Albuquerque, NM. It has begun a year-long testing phase prior deployment at McDonald Observatory in support of the CCD/Transit Instrument II (CTI-II). ALE is designed to produce a high-precision measurement of atmospheric absorption and scattering above the observatory site every ten minutes of every moderately clear night.
LIDAR (LIght Detection And Ranging) is the VIS/UV/IR analog of radar, using a laser, telescope and time-gated photodetector instead of a radio transmitter, dish and receiver. In the case of ALE -- an elastic backscatter LIDAR -- 20ns-long, eye-safe laser pulses are launched 2500 times per second from a 0.32m transmitting telescope co-mounted with a 50mm short-range receiver on an alt-az mounted 0.67m long-range receiver. Photons from the laser pulse are scattered and absorbed as the pulse propagates through the atmosphere, a portion of which are scattered into the field of view of the short- and long-range receiver telescopes and detected by a photomultiplier. The properties of a given volume of atmosphere along the LIDAR path are inferred from both the altitude-resolved backscatter signal as well as the attenuation of backscatter signal from altitudes above it.
We present ALE profiles from the commissioning phase and demonstrate some of the astronomically interesting atmospheric information that can be gleaned from these data, including, but not limited to, total line-of-sight extinction.
This project is funded by NSF Grant 0421087.
Fitch Jonathan J.
Gimmestad Gary G.
McGraw John T.
Roberts Dale
Smith Jeffrey J.
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