Submillimeter Atmospheric Transparency at Maunakea, at the South Pole, and at Chajnantor

Abstract

For a systematic assessment of submillimeter observing conditions at different sites, we constructed tipping radiometers to measure the broad band atmospheric transparency in the window around 350 $\mu$m wavelength. The tippers were deployed on Maunakea, Hawaii, at the South Pole, and in the vicinity of Cerro Chajnantor in northern Chile. Identical instruments permit direct comparison of these sites. Observing conditions at the South Pole and in the Chajnantor area are better than on Maunakea. Simultaneous measurements with two tippers demonstrate conditions at the summit of Cerro Chajnantor are significantly better than on the Chajnantor plateau.

arXiv commentAccepted by PASP

References in corpus (10)

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• The Millimeter Sky Transparency Imager (MiSTI)

Cited by in corpus (12)

• Evaluation of New Submillimeter VLBI Sites for the Event Horizon Telescope
• CCAT-prime Collaboration: Science Goals and Forecasts with Prime-Cam on the Fred Young Submillimeter Telescope
• Review: Far-Infrared Instrumentation and Technology Development for the Next Decade
• Assessments of Ali, Dome A, and Summit Camp for Mm-wave Observations Using MERRA-2 Reanalysis
• Sensitivity of the Prime-Cam Instrument on the CCAT-prime Telescope
• The optical design of the six-meter CCAT-prime and Simons Observatory telescopes
• Twenty years of PWV measurements in the Chajnantor Area
• Prime-Cam: A first-light instrument for the CCAT-prime telescope
• CCAT-prime: a novel telescope for submillimeter astronomy
• Analysis of the distribution of precipitable water vapor in the Chajnantor area
• The 1.4 mm core of Centaurus A: First VLBI results with the South Pole Telescope
• Deep-learning-based prediction of Precipitable Water Vapor in the Chajnantor area