Related papers: Measuring night sky brightness: methods and challe…
We present night sky brightness measurements performed at the Vienna University Observatory and at the Leopold-Figl-Observatorium fuer Astrophysik, which is located about 35km to the southwest of Vienna. The measurements have been performed…
The population of artificial satellites and space debris orbiting the Earth imposes non-negligible constraints on both space operations and ground-based optical and radio astronomy. The ongoing deployment of several satellite…
Optical instruments for measuring surface-wave characteristics provide a better spatial and temporal resolution than other methods, but they face difficulties while converting the results of indirect measurements into absolute levels of the…
In order to study transient phenomena in the Universe, existing and forthcoming imaging surveys are covering wide areas of sky repeatedly over time, with a range of cadences, point spread functions, and depths. We describe here a framework…
Large constellations of artificial satellites are beginning to interfere with astronomical observing. Visual magnitude measurements of these spacecraft are useful for monitoring and characterizing their brightness. This paper describes the…
Measurement of stray light in a complex optical system can be a complex task. We developed a method to measure coherent stray light inside an assembled device, determining all stray light sources and their relative contribution. The method…
The clarity of nights is the major factor that should be carefully considered for optical/infrared astronomical observatories in site-testing campaigns. Cloud coverage is directly related to the amount of time available for scientific…
In recent years, there has been a strong interest in measuring the available bandwidth of network paths. Several methods and techniques have been proposed and various measurement tools have been developed and evaluated. However, there have…
Astronomical observing has been greatly simplified by the development and implementation of digital imaging techniques and remote observing. Aperture photometry of CCD data permits photometric measurements to be made routinely with…
Near all-sky imaging photometry was performed from a boat on the Gulf of Aqaba to measure the night sky brightness in a coastal environment. The boat was not anchored, and therefore drifted and rocked. The camera was mounted on a tripod…
The sky observed by space telescopes in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) can be dominated by stray light from multiple sources including the Earth, Sun and Moon. This stray light presents a significant challenge to missions that aim to make a secure…
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory Wide-Fast Deep (WFD) sky survey will reach unprecedented surface brightness depths over tens of thousands of square degrees. Surface brightness photometry has traditionally been a challenge. Current algorithms…
For the majority of optical observing programs, the sky brightness provides the fundamental limit to signal detection such that the scientific feasibility is largely dictated by the moon phase. Since most observatories do not have the…
Photometry is a convenient operational method for monitoring such dynamically evolving phenomena as wind waves. Nowadays machine learning allows one to avoid explicit derivation of the solution to the problem, describing all the…
Light pollution is a form of environmental degradation in which excessive artificial outdoor lighting, such as street lamps, neon signs, and illuminated signboards, affects the natural environment and the ecosystem. Poorly designed outdoor…
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…
Reliable and exact assessment of visibility is essential for safe air traffic. In order to overcome the drawbacks of the currently subjective reports from human observers, we present an approach to automatically derive visibility measures…
In 2018, Solar Cycle 24 entered into a solar minimum phase. During this period, 11 million zenithal night sky brightness (NSB) data were collected at different dark sites around the planet, including astronomical observatories and natural…
Haze removal is important for computational photography and computer vision applications. However, most of the existing methods for dehazing are designed for daytime images, and cannot always work well in the nighttime. Different from the…
A new method of absolute calibration of sky noise temperature using a three-position switched spectrometer, measurements of antenna and low noise amplifier impedance with a vector network analyzer, and ancillary measurements of the…