Related papers: Quantifying photometric observing conditions on Pa…
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. The unit measures…
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…
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,…
In the search for small exoplanets orbiting cool stars whose spectral energy distributions peak in the near infrared, the strong absorption of radiation in this region due to water vapour in the atmosphere is a particularly adverse effect…
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…
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…
We utilise ground-based, balloon-borne and satellite climatology data to reconstruct site and season-dependent vertical profiles of precipitable water vapour (PWV). We use these profiles to solve radiative transfer through the atmosphere,…
ESO's two FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrographs (FORS) are the primary imaging cameras for the VLT. Since they are not direct-imaging cameras, the accuracy of photometry which can routinely be obtained is limited by significant sky…
We report precipitable water vapor (PWV) measurements made at Las Campanas Observatory using optical spectra of H2O lines obtained with the Magellan echelle spectrograph, and calculated using a robust technique that is accurate to 5-10%.…
The variability induced by precipitable water vapour (PWV) can heavily affect the accuracy of time-series photometric measurements gathered from the ground, especially in the near-infrared. We present here a novel method of modelling and…
Twilight studies have proved to be important tools to analyze the atmospheric structure with interesting consequences on the characterization of astronomical sites. Active discussions on this topic have been recently restarted in connection…
In this paper we present the first results ever obtained by applying the autoregressive (AR) technique to the precipitable water vapour (PWV). The study is performed at the Very Large Telescope. The AR technique has been recently proposed…
The presence of clouds between an airshower and a space-based detector can dramatically alter the measured signal characteristics due to absorption and scattering of the photonic signals. Furthermore, knowledge of the cloud cover in the…
In this paper we present and discuss for the first time a large data set of UBVRI night sky brightness measurements collected at ESO-Paranal from April 2000 to September 2001. A total of about 3900 images obtained on 174 different nights…
SPECULOOS-South, an observatory composed of four independent 1m robotic telescopes, located at ESO Paranal, Chile, started scientific operation in January 2019. This Southern Hemisphere facility operates as part of SPECULOOS, an…
In order to maximize the scientific return of the telescopes located at the Paranal Observatory, we analyse the properties of the atmosphere above Paranal in the near-infrared (NIR). We estimate atmospheric extinction in the spectral range…
We describe the implementation of a robotic SLODAR instrument at the Cerro Paranal observatory. The instrument measures the vertical profile of the optical atmospheric turbulence strength, in 8 resolution elements, to a maximum altitude…
Ground-based photometry of bright stars is expected to be limited by atmospheric scintillation, although in practice observations are often limited by other sources of systematic noise. We analyse 122 nights of bright star ($G_{mag} <…
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…
The Infrared spectral region is a rich one for variable star work, especially of cooler stars, but it has been hard to do IR photometry because of high, variable background, and specialized telescopic equipment that is usually required to…