aTmcam: a simple atmospheric transmission monitoring camera for sub 1% photometric precision

Ting Li; D. L. DePoy; R. Kessler; D. L. Burke; J. L. Marshall; J. Wise; J.-P. Rheault; D. W. Carona; S. Boada; T. Prochaska; R. Allen

doi:10.1117/12.924792

24 September 2012 aTmcam: a simple atmospheric transmission monitoring camera for sub 1% photometric precision

Ting Li, D. L. DePoy, R. Kessler, D. L. Burke, J. L. Marshall, J. Wise, J.-P. Rheault, D. W. Carona, S. Boada, T. Prochaska, R. Allen

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 8446, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy IV; 84462L (2012) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.924792
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2012, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Abstract

Traditional color and airmass corrections can typically achieve ~0.02 mag precision in photometric observing conditions. A major limiting factor is the variability in atmospheric throughput, which changes on timescales of less than a night. We present preliminary results for a system to monitor the throughput of the atmosphere, which should enable photometric precision when coupled to more traditional techniques of less than 1% in photometric conditions. The system, aTmCam, consists of a set of imagers each with a narrow-band filter that monitors the brightness of suitable standard stars. Each narrowband filter is selected to monitor a different wavelength region of the atmospheric transmission, including regions dominated by the precipitable water, aerosol optical depth, etc. We have built a prototype system to test the notion that an atmospheric model derived from a few color indices measurements can be an accurate representation of the true atmospheric transmission. We have measured the atmospheric transmission with both narrowband photometric measurements and spectroscopic measurements; we show that the narrowband imaging approach can predict the changes in the throughput of the atmosphere to better than ~10% across a broad wavelength range, so as to achieve photometric precision less than 0.01 mag.

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Ting Li, D. L. DePoy, R. Kessler, D. L. Burke, J. L. Marshall, J. Wise, J.-P. Rheault, D. W. Carona, S. Boada, T. Prochaska, and R. Allen "aTmcam: a simple atmospheric transmission monitoring camera for sub 1% photometric precision", Proc. SPIE 8446, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy IV, 84462L (24 September 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.924792

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