Measuring Night-Sky Brightness with a Wide-Field CCD Camera

Abstract

We describe a system for rapidly measuring the brightness of the night sky using a mosaic of CCD images obtained with a low-cost automated system. The portable system produces millions of independent photometric measurements covering the entire sky, enabling the detailed characterization of natural sky conditions and light domes produced by cities. The measurements are calibrated using images of standard stars contained within the raw data, producing results closely tracking the Johnson V astronomical standard. The National Park Service has collected hundreds of data sets at numerous parks since 2001 and is using these data for the protection and monitoring of the night-sky visual resource. This system also allows comprehensive characterization of sky conditions at astronomical observatories. We explore photometric issues raised by the broadband measurement of the complex and variable night-sky spectrum, and potential indices of night-sky quality.

22 pages, 16 figures; replaced missing/duplicated pages

References in corpus (4)

• The USNO-B Catalog
• UBVRI Night sky brightness during sunspot maximum at ESO-Paranal
• Night sky brightness at sites from DMSP-OLS satellite measurements
• Optical Night-Sky Brightness at Mauna Kea over the Course of a Complete Sunspot Cycle

Cited by in corpus (13)

• The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness
• Measuring night sky brightness: methods and challenges
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• Evaluating the summer night sky brightness at a research field site on Lake Stechlin in northeastern Germany
• Night Sky Brightness Measurement, Quality Assessment and Monitoring
• Optical Sky Brightness at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory from 1992 to 2006
• Monitoring transition: expected night sky brightness trends in different photometric bands
• Natural Night Sky Brightness during Solar Minimum
• Characterizing the zenithal night sky brightness in large territories: How many samples per square kilometer are needed?
• Natural experiments from Earth Hour reveal urban night sky being drastically lit up by few decorative buildings
• UBVRI night sky brightness at Kottamia Astronomical Observatory
• Models of the night-sky brightness and the efficiency of searching for exoplanets with the microlensing method