Related papers: Thirty Meter Telescope Site Testing VI: Turbulence…

The Simons Observatory is a ground-based telescope array located at an elevation of 5200 meters, in the Atacama Desert in Chile, designed to measure the temperature and polarization of the cosmic microwave background. It comprises four…

Current projects for large telescopes demand a proper knowledge of atmospheric turbulence to design efficient adaptive optics systems in order to reach large Strehl ratios. However, the proper characterization of the turbulence above a…

In a recent paper the authors presented an extended study aiming at simulating the classical meteorological parameters and the optical turbulence at Dome C during the winter with the atmospherical mesoscale model Meso-NH. A statistical…

(abridged) The Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (AtLAST) is undergoing a design study for a large (50 meter) single-dish submm-wavelength Ritchey-Chr\'etien telescope to be located 5050 meters above sea level in the Atacama…

We report the development and first results of an instrument called Low Layer Scidar (LOLAS) which is aimed at the measurement of optical-turbulence profiles in the atmospheric boundary layer with high altitude-resolution. The method is…

The TBT project is being developed under ESA's General Studies and Technology Programme (GSTP), and shall implement a test-bed for the validation of an autonomous optical observing system in a realistic scenario within the Space Situational…

In the context of the MOSE project, in this contribution we present a detailed analysis of the Meso-NH mesoscale model performances and their dependency on the model and orography horizontal resolutions in proximity of the ground. The…

After a site testing campaign spanning 5 sites over a period of 5 years, the site selection for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) culminated with the choice of Mauna Kea 13N in Hawaii. During the campaign, a lot practical lessons were…

The results obtained using the temperature monitoring systems of the 6-m BTA telescope primary mirror, dome space, and external environment are reported. We consider the factors that affect the development of microturbulence in the…

The Simons Observatory (SO) is a ground-based cosmic microwave background (CMB) survey experiment that consists of three 0.5 m small-aperture telescopes (SATs) and one 6 m large-aperture telescope (LAT), sited at an elevation of 5200 m in…

We present observations at 10 and 15 GHz taken with the Tenerife experiments in a band of the sky at Dec.=+35 degrees. These experiments are sensitive to multipoles in the range l=10-30. The sensitivity per beam is 56 and 20 microK for the…

We probe turbulence structure from centimetric to metric scales by simultaneous imagery at mid-infrared and visible wavelengths at the VLT telescope and show that it departs significantly from the commonly used Kolmogorov model. The data…

The internal antarctic plateau revealed in the last years to be a site with interesting potentialities for the astronomical applications due to the extreme dryness and low temperatures, the typical high altitude of the plateau, the weak…

In this contribution we present preliminary results of a study applied to the Observatories of Roque de Los Muchachos (La Palma) and Teide (Tenerife) in Canary Islands aiming to investigate the possibility to implement an automatic system…

Scintillation noise is a major limitation of ground base photometric precision. An extensive dataset of stellar scintillation collected at 11 astronomical sites world-wide with MASS instruments was used to estimate the scintillation noise…

This is the second article of a series devoted to European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) site characterization. In this article we present the main properties of the parameters involved in high angular resolution observations from the…

Atmospheric turbulence profile plays an important role in designing and operating adaptive optics (AO) systems with multiple laser guide stars. To obtain representative free atmospheric profiles and resolved ground layer profiles for future…

The Millimeter Sky Transparency Imager (MiSTI) is a small millimeter-wave scanning telescope with a 25-cm diameter dish operating at 183 GHz. MiSTI is installed at Atacama, Chile, and it measures emission from atmospheric water vapor and…

The TMS optical system is based on a decentered dual-reflector system in a Gregorian configuration to observe with an angular resolution of less than $2^\circ$. The primary goal of the present study is to evaluate the final design and…

We present an analysis of the science image quality obtained on the twin 6.5 metre Magellan telescopes over a 1.5 year period, using images of ~10^5 stars. We find that the telescopes generally obtain significantly better image quality than…