Atmospheric Extinction Coefficients and Night Sky Brightness At the Xuyi Observational Station

Abstract

We present measurements of the optical broadband atmospheric extinction coefficients and the night sky brightness at the Xuyi Observational Station of Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO). The measurements are based on CCD imaging data taken in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey g, r and i bands with the Xuyi 1.04/1.20m Schmidt Telescope for the Xuyi Schmidt Telescope Photometric Survey of the Galactic Anti-center (XSTPS-GAC), the photometric part of the Digital Sky Survey of the Galactic Anti-center (DSS-GAC). The data were collected in more than 130 winter nights from 2009 to 2011. We find that the atmospheric extinction coefficients for the g, r and i bands are 0.70, 0.55 and 0.38 mag/airmass, respectively, based on observations taken in several photometric nights. The night sky brightness determined from images of good quality has median val- ues of 21.7, 20.8 and 20.0 mag/arcsec2 and reaches 22.1, 21.2 and 20.4 mag/arcsec2 under the best observing conditions for the g, r and i bands, respectively. The relatively large extinction coefficients compared with other good astronomical observing sites are mainly due to the relatively low elevation (i.e. 180 m) and high humidity of the Station.

10pages, 5 figures; Accepted for publication in Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics

References in corpus (3)

• Empirical Color Transformations Between SDSS Photometry and Other Photometric Systems
• The site conditions of the Guo Shou Jing Telescope
• An Improved Photometric Calibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Imaging Data

Cited by in corpus (12)

• LAMOST Spectroscopic Survey of the Galactic Anti-centre (LSS-GAC): target selection and the first release of value-added catalogues
• Empirical metallicity-dependent calibrations of effective temperature against colours for dwarfs and giants based on interferometric data
• A three dimensional extinction map of the Galactic Anticentre from multi-band photometry
• The photometric system of the One-meter Telescope at Weihai Observatory of Shandong University
• Deep Imaging of the HCG 95 Field.I.Ultra-diffuse Galaxies
• Dust-to-gas ratio, $X_{\mathrm{CO}}$ factor and CO-dark gas in the Galactic anticentre: an observational study
• Mapping the Galactic Disk with the LAMOST and Gaia Red Clump Sample VII: the Stellar Disk Structure Revealed by the Mono-abundance Populations
• Mapping the three-dimensional dust extinction toward the supernova remnant S147 - the S147 dust cloud
• Constraining the Galactic structure parameters with the XSTPS-GAC and SDSS photometric surveys
• DA white dwarfs from the LSS-GAC survey DR1: the preliminary luminosity and mass functions and formation rate
• New Open Cluster Candidates Discovered in the XSTPS-GAC Survey
• Correction factors of the measurement errors of the LAMOST-LRS stellar parameters