Related papers: An advanced scattered moonlight model for Cerro Pa…
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…
We report measurements from which we determine the spatial structure of the lunar contribution to night sky brightness, taken at the LSST site on Cerro Pachon in Chile. We use an array of six photodiodes with filters that approximate the…
The Earth's atmosphere affects ground-based astronomical observations. Scattering, absorption, and radiation processes deteriorate the signal-to-noise ratio of the data received. For scheduling astronomical observations it is, therefore,…
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…
The visual perception of the natural night sky in many places of the world is strongly disturbed by anthropogenic light. Part of this artificial light is scattered in the atmosphere and propagates towards the observer, adding to the natural…
Earthshine is the dominant source of natural illumination on the surface of the Moon during lunar night, and at locations within permanently shadowed regions that never receive direct sunlight. As such, earthshine may enable the exploration…
This paper presents multi-filter measurements of the night sky brightness at the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in Sutherland in the presence of a bright moon. The observations cover a wide range of sky directions, lunar…
The ultra-precise photometric space satellite MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) will provide the first opportunity to measure the albedos and scattered light curves from known short-period extrasolar planets. Due to the…
Since the early 1970s, stellar population modelling has been one of the basic tools for understanding the physics of unresolved systems from observation of their integrated light. Models allow us to relate the integrated spectra (or…
Modeling the hemispherical night sky brightness of anthropogenic origin is a demanding computational challenge, due to the intensive calculations required to produce all-sky maps with fine angular resolution including high-order scattering…
Light scattering in disordered media has been studied extensively due to its prevalence in natural and artificial systems [1]. In the field of photonics most of the research has focused on understanding and mitigating the effects of…
Contrary to some widespread intuitive belief, the night sky brightness perceived by the human eye or any other physical detector does not come (exclusively) from high in the sky. The detected brightness is built up from the scattered…
When light travels through scattering media, speckles (spatially random distribution of fluctuated intensities) are formed due to the interference of light travelling along different optical paths, preventing the perception of structure,…
A trade-off between speed and information controls our understanding of astronomical objects. Fast-to-acquire photometric observations provide global properties, while costly and time-consuming spectroscopic measurements enable a better…
We present a novel approach of modelling surface light scattering in the context of freeform optical design. The model relies on energy conservation and optimal transport theory. For isotropic scattering in cylindrically or rotationally…
With a sky brightness monitor in Xinglong station of National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC), we collected data from 22 dark clear nights and 90 lunar nights. We first measured the sky brightness variation with time in dark…
Over the past 30 years, numerous large-scale photometric astronomical surveys have been conducted, including SDSS, Pan-STARRS, Gaia,2MASS, WISE, and others. These surveys provide extensive photometric measurements that can be used to infer…
Structural coloration produces some of the most brilliant colors in nature and has many applications. However, the two competing properties of narrow bandwidth and broad viewing angle have not been achieved simultaneously in previous…
We analyze and fit visible spectra of a red horizon at sunrise. The shape of the spectra consist of a blue continuum followed by a red bump. The reddest spectra are well fitted by the product of a spectrum of extinguished sunlight (Rayleigh…
The Arago spot is an intensity maximum at the center of a shadow created by constructive interference of diffracted waves around a spherical object. While the study of diffraction patterns usually concerns visible light, de Broglie's wave…