Related papers: Natural Night Sky Brightness during Solar Minimum

The present work provides the results of the first six years of operation of the systematic night-sky monitoring at ESO-Paranal (Chile). The UBVRI night-sky brightness was estimated on about 10,000 VLT-FORS1 archival images, obtained on…

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…

Circa-monthly activity conducted by moonlight is observed in many species on Earth. Given the vast amount of artificial light at night (ALAN) that pollutes large areas around the globe, the synchronization to the circalunar cycle is often…

Night sky brightness is a major source of noise both for Cherenkov telescopes as well as for wide-angle Cherenkov detectors. Therefore, it is important to know the level of night sky brightness at potential sites for future experiments. The…

We report on luminance measurements of the summer night sky at a field site on a freshwater lake in northeastern Germany (Lake Stechlin) to evaluate the amount of artificial skyglow from nearby and distant towns in the context of a planned…

We present the measurements of sky surface brightness on Mount Graham International Observatory obtained during the first binocular-mode science runs at the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT). A total of 860 images obtained on 23 moonless…

The Northern Sky Variability Survey (NSVS) is a temporal record of the sky over the optical magnitude range from 8 to 15.5. It was conducted in the course of the first generation Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment (ROTSE-I) using a…

The photometric sky quality of Mt. Shatdzhatmaz, the site of Sternberg Astronomical Institute Caucasian Observatory 2.5 m telescope, is characterized here by the statistics of the night-time sky brightness and extinction. The data were…

Under stable atmospheric conditions, the zenithal brightness of the urban sky varies throughout the night following the time course of the anthropogenic emissions of light. Different types of artificial light sources (e.g. streetlights,…

The solar activity in the current, that is, the 24-th, sunspot cycle is analyzed. Cyclic variations in the sunspot number (SSN) and radiation fluxes in various spectral ranges have been estimated in comparison with the general level of the…

A key science driver for the next generation of wide-field optical and radio surveys is the exploration of the time variable sky. These surveys will have unprecedented sensitivity and areal coverage, but will be limited in their ability to…

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…

We present spectroscopic measurements on the night sky of Xinglong Observatory for a period of 12 years from 2004 to 2015. The spectra were obtained on moonless clear nights using the OMR spectrograph mounted on a 2.16-m reflector with a…

We apply the sky brightness modelling technique introduced and developed by Roy Garstang to high-resolution DMSP-OLS satellite measurements of upward artificial light flux and to GTOPO30 digital elevation data in order to predict the…

Although there are now some tentative signs that the start of cycle 24 has begun there is still considerable interest in the somewhat unusual behaviour of the current solar minimum and the apparent delay in the true start of the next cycle.…

Although low surface brightness galaxies (LSBs) contribute a large fraction to the number density of galaxies, their properties are still poorly known. LSBs are often considered dust poor, based only on a few studies. We use, for the first…

We used New Horizons LORRI images to measure the optical-band ($0.4\lesssim\lambda\lesssim0.9{\rm\mu m}$) sky brightness within a high galactic-latitude field selected to have reduced diffuse scattered light from the Milky Way galaxy (DGL),…

The low surface brightness (LSB) regime ($\mu_{g} \gtrsim 26$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$) comprises a vast, mostly unexplored discovery space, from dwarf galaxies to the diffuse interstellar medium. Accessing this regime requires precisely removing…

The number of satellites on low orbit has dramatically increased over the past years, raising concerns among the astronomical community about their impact on observations. Spectroscopic observations represent a large fraction of…

We used existing data from the New Horizons LORRI camera to measure the optical-band ($0.4\lesssim\lambda\lesssim0.9{\rm\mu m}$) sky brightness within seven high galactic latitude fields. The average raw level measured while New Horizons…