Related papers: An atmospheric radiation model for Cerro Paranal. …
Climate change is affecting and will increasingly affect astronomical observations. In this paper, we investigated the role some key weather parameters play in the quality of astronomical observations, and analysed their long-term trends…
We investigate the polarization patterns from the moonlit sky as observed from the European Southern Observatory at Cerro Paranal. The moonlit sky background can be significant in astronomical observations and thus be a source of…
Estimating the sky background is critical for ground-based astronomical research. In the optical, scattered moonlight dominates the sky background, when the moon is above the horizon. The most uncertain component of a scattered moonlight…
The largest natural source of light at night is the Moon, and it is the major contributor to the astronomical sky background. Being able to accurately predict the sky background, including scattered moonlight is important for scheduling…
This article aims at proving the feasibility of the forecast of all the most relevant classical atmospherical parameters for astronomical applications (wind speed and direction, temperature) above the ESO ground-base site of Cerro Paranal…
Below about 2.3 $\mu$m, the nighttime emission of the Earth's atmosphere is dominated by non-thermal radiation from the mesosphere and thermosphere. As this airglow can even outshine scattered moonlight in the near-infrared regime, the…
Aims: We studied the precipitable water vapour (PWV) content near Cerro Armazones and discuss the potential use of our technique of modelling the telluric absorbtion lines for the investigation of other molecular layers. The site is…
A Low Humidity and Temperature Profiling (LHATPRO) microwave radiometer, manufactured by Radiometer Physics GmbH (RPG), is used to monitor sky conditions over ESO's Paranal observatory in support of VLT science operations. In addition to…
Knowledge of the Earth's atmospheric optical turbulence is critical for astronomical instrumentation. Not only does it enable performance verification and optimisation of existing systems but it is required for the design of future…
The high-resolution echelle spectrograph UVES of the Very Large Telescope at Cerro Paranal in Chile has been regularly operated since April 2000. Thus, UVES archival data originally taken for astronomical projects but also including sky…
We perform Monte Carlo simulations of cosmic ray-induced hard X-ray radiation from the Earth's atmosphere. We find that the shape of the spectrum emergent from the atmosphere in the energy range 25-300 keV is mainly determined by Compton…
Optical turbulence affects significantly the quality of ground-based astronomical observations. An accurate and reliable forecast of optical turbulence can help to optimise the scheduling of the science observations and to improve both the…
In this paper we study the abilities of an atmospherical mesoscale model in forecasting the classical atmospherical parameters relevant for astronomical applications at the surface layer (wind speed, wind direction, temperature, relative…
Surface solar irradiance varies on scales as small as seconds or meters due to scattering and absorption by the atmosphere. Clouds are the main driver of this variability, but moisture structures in the atmospheric boundary layer and…
We present very encouraging preliminary results obtained in the context of the MOSE project, an on-going study aiming at investigating the feasibility of the forecast of the optical turbulence and meteorological parameters (in the free…
In addition to astro-meteorological parameters, such as seeing, coherence time and isoplanatic angle, the vertical profile of the Earth's atmospheric turbulence strength and velocity is important for instrument design, performance…
Motivated by the recognition that variation in the optical transmission of the atmosphere is probably the main limitation to the precision of ground-based CCD measurements of celestial fluxes, we review the physical processes that attenuate…
Water vapour in the atmosphere is the main source of the atmospheric opacity in the infrared and sub-millimetric regimes and its value plays a critical role in observations done with instruments working at these wavelengths on ground-based…
Atmospheric seeing arises from stochastic fluctuations in the refractive index of the Earth's atmosphere, producing random variations in the apparent direction of incoming light from astronomical sources. Scintillation refers to the…
Many adaptive optics systems operate by measuring the distortion of the wavefront in one wavelength range and performing the scientific observations in a second, different wavelength range. One common technique is to measure wavefront…