Mount Pinatubo and Atmospheric Extinction at Mount John University Observatory 1987-94

Extinction coefficients and sensitivity values in the JHKL band-passes measured on nearly 200 nights of observing between 1978 and 1992 on the 1.5-meter and the Blanco 4- meter telescopes at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory are presented and discussed. Analysis of these data shows the following: There are seasonal variations in both the extinction coefficients and sensitivity values that are qualitatively consistent with expected variations in the amount of H2O in the ...

The measurement of colours in photometric surveys is a path to get access to cosmological distances. But for future large surveys like the Large Survey of Space and Time undertaken by the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, the large statistical power of the promised catalogues will make the photometric calibration uncertainties dominant in the error budget and will limit our ability to use it for precision cosmology. The knowledge of the in situ atmospheric transmission for eac...

We present here the All Sky Transmission MONitor (ASTMON), designed to perform a continuous monitoring of the surface brightness of the complete night-sky in several bands. The data acquired are used to derive, in addition, a subsequent map of the multiband atmospheric extinction at any location in the sky, and a map of the cloud coverage. The instrument has been manufactured to afford extreme weather conditions, and remain operative. Designed to be fully robotic, it is ideal...

This paper examines the variations, because of atmospheric extinction, of broad-band visible spectra, obtained from long-slit spectroscopy, in the vicinity of some stars, nebulae, and one faint galaxy.

Significant events such as volcanic eruptions can have global and long lasting impacts on climate. These global impacts, however, are not uniform across space and time. Understanding how the Mt. Pinatubo eruption affects global and regional climate is of great interest for predicting impact on climate due to similar events. We propose a Bayesian framework to simultaneously detect and estimate spatially-varying temporal changepoints for regional climate impacts. Our approach t...

I consider whether we can significantly improve the Cardelli et al. (1989) family of extinction laws using new data and techniques. There are six different aspects that need to be treated: The use of monochromatic quantities, the three different wavelength regimes (NIR, optical and UV), the sample, and the photometric calibration. Excluding the behavior in the NIR and UV, I discuss the other four aspects and propose a new family of extinction laws derived from VLT/FLAMES and ...

Extinction is the elephant in the room that almost everyone tries to avoid when analyzing optical/IR data: astronomers tend to find a quick fix for it that the referee will accept, but that does not mean such a solution is correct or even optimal. In this contribution I address three important issues related to extinction that are commonly ignored and present current and future solutions for them: [1] Extinction produces non-linear photometric effects, [2] the extinction law ...

The June 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption resulted in a massive increase of sulfate aerosols in the atmosphere, absorbing radiation and leading to global changes in surface and stratospheric temperatures. A volcanic eruption of this magnitude serves as a natural analog for stratospheric aerosol injection, a proposed solar radiation modification method to combat the warming climate. The impacts of such an event are multifaceted and region-specific. Our goal is to characterize the mu...

We propose an improved method for the atmospheric extinction reduction within optical photometry. Our method is based on the simultaneous multicolor observations of photometric standards. Such data are now available within the modern wide-field sky surveys and contain a large amount of information about instant atmospheric conditions. So, it became possible to estimate the extinction parameters on the basis of a quite short observational dataset and, hence, to trace the rapid...

We report on measurements of the extinction in the U, B & V bands and of the NSB (Night Sky Background) during 2 dark periods on La Silla Observatory and at 4000-5000m on the ALMA site using an UV optimized 25 cm portable telescope.