Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2012
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21942207z&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #422.07
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Earth's atmosphere is a wavelength-, directionally- and time-dependent turbid refractive element for every ground-based telescope. Changes in atmospheric transmission are the most significant systematic error limiting photometric measurement precision and accuracy. While considerable resources have been devoted to correcting the effects of the atmosphere on angular resolution, the effects on precision photometry have largely been ignored. To correct photometric measurements for the transmission of the atmosphere requires direct measurements of the wavelength-dependent transmission in the same direction and at the same time that the supported photometric telescope is acquiring its data.
We describe the multi-wavelength lidar, the Facility Lidar for Astronomical Measurement of Extinction (FLAME) that observes the stable stratosphere, and a spectrophotometer (the Astronomical Extinction Spectrophotometer - AESoP) that creates and maintains NIST absolute standard stars, the combination of which enables fundamentally statistically limited photometric precision of both the stellar spectra and atmospheric transmission. The throughput of both FLAME and AESoP are calibrated to NIST radiometric standards.
This inexpensive and replicable instrument suite provides the lidar-determined monochromatic transmission of Earth's atmosphere at visible and near-infrared wavelengths to 0.25% per airmass and the wavelength-dependent transparency to less than 1% uncertainty per nanometer per minute of time. These atmospheric data are merged to create a metadata stream that allows throughput corrections from data acquired at the time of the scientific observations to be applied to broadband and spectrophotometric scientific data. This new technique replaces the classical use of nightly mean atmospheric extinction coefficients, which invoke a stationary and plane-parallel atmosphere and ultimately limit ground-based all-sky photometry to 1% - 2% precision.
This research is supported by NIST Award 60NANB9D9121 and NSF Grant AST-1009878.
Cramer Claire E.
Karle J. C.
Lykke Keith R.
McGraw John T.
Vorobiev D. M.
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