Winter sky brightness and cloud cover at Dome A, Antarctica
2012
At the summit of the Antarctic plateau, Dome A offers an intriguing location for
future large scale optical astronomical observatories. The Gattini Dome A project was created
to measure the optical sky brightness and large area cloud cover of the winter-time sky above
this high altitude Antarctic site. The wide field camera and multi-filter system was installed
on the PLATO instrument module as part of the Chinese-led traverse to Dome A in January
2008. This automated wide field camera consists of an Apogee U4000 interline CCD coupled to
a Nikon fisheye lens enclosed in a heated container with glass window. The system contains a
filter mechanism providing a suite of standard astronomical photometric filters (Bessell B, V,
R) and a long-pass red filter for the detection and monitoring of airglow emission. The system
operated continuously throughout the 2009, and 2011 winter seasons and part-way through the
2010 season, recording long exposure images sequentially for each filter. We have in hand one
complete winter-time dataset (2009) returned via a manned traverse. We present here the first
measurements of sky brightness in the photometric V band, cloud cover statistics measured so
far and an estimate of the extinction.
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