Related papers: Moonlit sky polarization patterns from Cerro Paran…
Scattering processes in the atmospheres of planets cause characteristic features that can be particularly well observed in polarisation. For planet Earth, both molecular and scattering by small particles imprint specific signatures in its…
This work presents a simple alternative technique to observe the polarization of the skylight on Earth. Using a birefringent material and a polarizer to look at the polarized light from the blue sky, it is possible to see a colored pattern…
The sunlight reflected from the Moon during a total lunar eclipse has been transmitted through the Earth's atmosphere on the way to the Moon. The combination of multiple scattering and inhomogeneous atmospheric characteristics during that…
The polarimetry of the light scattered by planetary surfaces is a powerful tool to provide constraints on their microstructure. To improve the interpretation of polarimetric data from icy surfaces, we have developed the POLarimeter for ICE…
Emission spectroscopy is an invaluable tool for probing the atmospheres of brown dwarfs and exoplanets, but interpretations based on flux spectra alone often suffer from degeneracies among temperature structure, chemical composition, and…
Context: Polarimetry is a very powerful tool to uncover various properties of astronomical objects that remain otherwise hidden in standard imaging or spectroscopic observations. However, the reliable measurement of the low polarization…
Direct imaging has paved the way for atmospheric characterization of young and self-luminous gas giants. Scattering in a horizontally-inhomogeneous atmosphere causes the disk-integrated polarization of the thermal radiation to be linearly…
We present the results of the optical spectropolarimetry of Earthshine on the Moon for Earth phase angles ranging from 49 to 96 degrees. The observations were conducted on 2011 March 9-13 (UT) using the spectropolarimeter HBS installed on…
Study of cosmic dust and planetary aerosols indicate that some of them contain a large number of aggregates of the size that significantly exceeds the wavelengths of the visible light. In some cases such large aggregates may dominate in…
Several strong resonance lines, such as H I Ly-$\alpha$, Mg II k, Ca II K, Ca I 4227 \AA\, which are characterized by deep and broad absorption profiles in the solar intensity spectrum, show conspicuous linear scattering polarization…
Remote sensing instruments observe radiation being scattered and absorbed by molecules, aerosol particles, cloud droplets and ice crystals. In order to interpret and accurately model such observations, the vector radiative transfer equation…
While there have been multiple observational programs aimed at detecting linear polarization of optical radiation emitted by ultracool dwarfs, there has been comparatively less rigorous theoretical analysis of the problem. The general…
We investigated the potential of polarimetric observations in the optical wavelength range for the detection of exomoons and the characterization of exoplanet-exomoon systems. Using the three-dimensional Monte Carlo radiative transfer code…
Lyman-$\alpha$ (Ly$\alpha$) is a powerful astrophysical probe. Not only is it ubiquitous at high redshifts, it is also a resonant line, making Ly$\alpha$ photons scatter. This scattering process depends on the physical conditions of the gas…
A general theoretical framework is developed for interpreting spectropolarimetric observations of optically thin emission line scattering from small dust particles. Spatially integrated and spatially resolved line profiles of both scattered…
Wide-field polarization measurements of the twilight sky background during the several nights with bright and extended noctilucent clouds in central and northern Russia in 2014 and 2015 are used to build the phase dependence of degree of…
We report the first measurement of the zodiacal light (ZL) polarization spectrum in the near-infrared between 0.8 and 1.8 $\mu$m. Using the low-resolution spectrometer (LRS) on board the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER),…
This is a theoretical investigation on the formation of the linearly polarized line spectrum of ionized cerium in the sun. We calculate the scattering line polarization pattern emergent from a plane-parallel layer of Ce {\sc ii} atoms…
Measurements of the polarized reflected sunlight from atmosphereless solar system bodies, over a range of phase angles, provide information about the surface structure and composition. With this work, we provide analysis of the polarimetric…
Polarization during a lunar eclipse is a forgotten mystery. Coyne & Pellicori (1970) reported the detection of significant polarization during the lunar eclipse on 1968 April 13. Multiple scattering during the first transmission through the…