SKYSURF-4: Panchromatic HST All-Sky Surface-Brightness Measurement Methods and Results
Abstract
The diffuse, unresolved sky provides most of the photons that the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) receives, yet remains poorly understood. HST Archival Legacy program SKYSURF aims to measure the 0.2-1.6 m sky surface brightness (sky-SB) from over 140,000 HST images. We describe a sky-SB measurement algorithm designed for SKYSURF that is able to recover the input sky-SB from simulated images to within 1% uncertainty. We present our sky-SB measurements estimated using this algorithm on the entire SKYSURF database. Comparing our sky-SB spectral energy distribution (SED) to measurements from the literature shows general agreements. Our SKYSURF SED also reveals a possible dependence on Sun angle, indicating either non-isotropic scattering of solar photons off interplanetary dust or an additional component to Zodiacal Light. Finally, we update Diffuse Light limits in the near-IR based on the methods from Carleton et al. (2022), with values of 0.009 MJy sr (22 nW m sr) at 1.25 m, 0.015 MJy sr (32 nW m sr) at 1.4 m, and 0.013 MJy sr (25 nW m sr) at 1.6 m. These estimates provide the most stringent all-sky constraints to date in this wavelength range. SKYSURF sky-SB measurements are made public on the official SKYSURF website and will be used to constrain Diffuse Light in future papers.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2210.08010,
title = {SKYSURF-4: Panchromatic HST All-Sky Surface-Brightness Measurement Methods and Results},
author = {Rosalia O'Brien and Timothy Carleton and Rogier A. Windhorst and Rolf A. Jansen and Delondrae Carter and Scott Tompkins and Sarah Caddy and Seth H. Cohen and Haley Abate and Richard G. Arendt and Jessica Berkheimer and Annalisa Calamida and Stefano Casertano and Simon P. Driver and Connor Gelb and Zak Goisman and Norman Grogin and Daniel Henningsen and Isabela Huckabee and Scott J. Kenyon and Anton M. Koekemoer and Darby Kramer and John Mackenty and Aaron Robotham and Steven Sherman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.08010},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
Revised based on helpful comments from the reviewer, and accepted to AJ on April 12th, 2023. Main paper: 18 pages, 9 figures, 4 tables. Appendices: 16 pages, 10 figures, 1 table. Main results shown in Figure 7 and Table 4