A multi-band map of the natural night sky brightness including Gaia and Hipparcos integrated starlight

Abstract

The natural night sky brightness is a relevant input for monitoring the light pollution evolution at observatory sites, by subtracting it from the overall sky brightness determined by direct measurements. It is also instrumental for assessing the expected darkness of the pristine night skies. The natural brightness of the night sky is determined by the sum of the spectral radiances coming from astrophysical sources, including zodiacal light, and the atmospheric airglow. The resulting radiance is modified by absorption and scattering before it reaches the observer. Therefore, the natural night sky brightness is a function of the location, time and atmospheric conditions. We present in this work GAMBONS (GAia Map of the Brightness Of the Natural Sky), a model to map the natural night brightness of the sky in cloudless and moonless nights. Unlike previous maps, GAMBONS is based on the extra-atmospheric star radiance obtained from the Gaia catalogue. The Gaia-DR2 archive compiles astrometric and photometric information for more than 1.6 billion stars up to G = 21 magnitude. For the brightest stars, not included in Gaia-DR2, we have used the Hipparcos catalogue instead. After adding up to the star radiance the contributions of the diffuse galactic and extragalactic light, zodiacal light and airglow, and taking into account the effects of atmospheric attenuation and scattering, the radiance detected by ground-based observers can be estimated. This methodology can be applied to any photometric band, if appropriate transformations from the Gaia bands are available. In particular, we present the expected sky brightness for V (Johnson), and visual photopic and scotopic passbands.

To be published in MNRAS. 15 pages; 13 figures. The model is available at http://gambons.fqa.ub.edu

References in corpus (10)

• The Gaia mission
• The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness
• Measuring night sky brightness: methods and challenges
• Techniques and Review of Absolute Flux Calibration from the Ultraviolet to the Mid-Infrared
• The Dancing Sky: 6 years of night sky observations at Cerro Paranal
• Ultraviolet to optical diffuse sky emission as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope Faint Object Spectrograph
• Magnitude to luminance conversions and visual brightness of the night sky
• Measurements of the mean diffuse galactic light spectrum in the 0.95 μm to 1.65 μm band from CIBER
• Toward an atlas of the number of visible stars
• The surface brightness of the Galaxy at the Solar Neighbourhood

Cited by in corpus (19)

• The proliferation of space objects is a rapidly increasing source of artificial night sky brightness
• A Measurement of the Cosmic Optical Background and Diffuse Galactic Light Scaling from the R < 50 AU New Horizons-LORRI Data
• Long-term trends of light pollution assessed from SQM measurements and an empirical atmospheric model
• Natural Night Sky Brightness during Solar Minimum
• Modelling the artificial night sky brightness at short distances from streetlights
• Light pollution and the concentration of anthropogenic photons in the terrestrial atmosphere
• Can we illuminate our cities and (still) see the stars?
• A revised simplified scattering model for the moonlit sky brightness profile based on photometry at SAAO
• Characterisation of Timau National Observatory using limited in-situ measurements
• Quantitative evaluation of outdoor artificial light emissions using low Earth orbit radiometers
• Natural experiments from Earth Hour reveal urban night sky being drastically lit up by few decorative buildings
• Estimating linear radiance indicators from the zenith night sky brightness: on the Posch ratio for natural and light polluted skies
• Quantifying the visual impact of wind farm lights on the nocturnal landscape
• Revisiting the Local Interstellar Radiation Field using Gaia DR3
• Assessing light pollution in vast areas: zenith sky brightness maps of Catalonia
• Detecting changes in anthropogenic light emissions: limits due to atmospheric variability
• PALACE v1.0: Paranal Airglow Line And Continuum Emission model
• Multi-parameter study for a new Ground-Based telescope in Egypt
• Advanced modelling of Night Sky Background light for Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes