Related papers: Techniques for measuring atmospheric aerosols at t…
Air fluorescence measurements of cosmic ray energy must be corrected for attenuation of the atmosphere. In this paper we show that the air-showers themselves can yield a measurement of the aerosol attenuation in terms of optical depth,…
The High Resolution Fly's Eye experiment has measured the flux of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays using the stereoscopic air fluorescence technique. The HiRes experiment consists of two detectors that observe cosmic ray showers via the…
We describe an experiment, located in south-east Colorado, USA, that measured aerosol optical depth profiles using two Lidar techniques. Two independent detectors measured scattered light from a vertical UV laser beam. One detector, located…
We have measured the cosmic ray spectrum above 10^17.2 eV using the two air fluorescence detectors of the High Resolution Fly's Eye observatory operating in monocular mode. We describe the detector, photo-tube and atmospheric calibrations,…
We present a new method to measure the vertical aerosol optical depth (VAOD) during clear nights using a wide-field imager - a CCD camera with a photographic lens on an equatorial mount. A series of 30-second exposures taken at different…
The idea of using stellar photometry for atmospheric monitoring for optical experiments in high-energy astrophysics is seemingly straightforward, but reaching high precision of the order of 0.01 in the determination of the vertical aerosol…
The Pierre Auger Observatory detects the highest energy cosmic rays. Calorimetric measurements of extensive air showers induced by cosmic rays are performed with a fluorescence detector. Thus, one of the main challenges is the atmospheric…
The characterization of the optical properties of the atmosphere in the near UV, in particular the tropospheric aerosol stratification, clouds optical depth and spatial distribution are common in the field of atmospheric physics, due to…
Point sources in the atmosphere are surrounded by aureole because of atmospheric scattering. The properties of the time-dependent aureole radiance are calculated by use of a Monte Carlo approach and an iterative method. Since the aureole is…
Measurements of the cosmic-ray air-shower fluorescence at extreme energies require precise knowledge of atmospheric conditions. The absolute calibration of the cosmic-ray energy depends on the absorption of fluorescence light between its…
The air fluorescence detectors (FDs) of the Pierre Auger Observatory are vital for the determination of the air shower energy scale. To compensate for variations in atmospheric conditions that affect the energy measurement, the Observatory…
The Pierre Auger Observatory in Malarg\"ue, Argentina, is designed to study the properties of ultra-high energy cosmic rays with energies above 1018 eV. It is a hybrid facility that employs a Fluorescence Detector to perform nearly…
The new method for aerosol measurement using wide-field stellar photometry was originally developed for B-filter data. The dependence of VAOD (vertical aerosol optical depth) on wavelength can be used to understand the physical…
Measurements are reported on the fluorescence of air as a function of depth in electromagnetic showers initiated by bunches of 28.5 GeV electrons. The light yield is compared with the expected and observed depth profiles of ionization in…
An atmospheric transparency was measured using a LIDAR with a pulsed UV laser (355nm) at the observation site of Telescope Array in Utah, USA. The measurement at night for two years in $2007\sim 2009$ revealed that the extinction…
One of the methods for studying the highest energy cosmic rays is to measure the fluorescence light emitted by the extensive air showers induced by them. To reconstruct a shower cascade curve from measurements of the number of photons…
The method of detection of light scattering on stratospheric aerosol particles on the twilight sky background is considered. It is based on the data on sky intensity and polarization in the solar vertical at zenith distances of up to 50 deg…
Nighttime monitoring of the aerosol content of the lower atmosphere is a challenging task, because appropriate reference natural light sources are lacking. Here we show that the anthropogenic night sky brightness due to city lights can be…
Air fluorescence detectors measure the energy of ultra-high energy cosmic rays by collecting fluorescence light emitted from nitrogen molecules along the extensive air shower cascade. To ensure a reliable energy determination, the light…
The atmospheric aerosol monitoring system of the Pierre Auger Observatory has been operating smoothly since 2004. Two laser facilities (Central Laser Facility, CLF and eXtreme Laser Facility, XLF) fire sets of 50 shots four times per hour…