Winter sky brightness and cloud cover at Dome A, Antarctica

• Main Authors: Moore, Anna M., Yang, Yi, Fu, Jianning, Ashley, Michael C. B., Cui, Xiangqun, Feng, LongLong, Gong, Xuefei, Hu, Zhongwen, Lawrence, Jon S., Luong-van, Daniel M., Riddle, Reed, Shang, Zhaohui, Sims, Geoff, Storey, John W. V., Tothill, Nicholas F. H., Travouillon, Tony, Wang, Lifan, Yang, Huigen, Yang, Ji, Zhou, Xu, Zhu, Zhenxi
• Other Authors: Burton, Michael G.
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge University Press 2013
• Subjects: Antarctic; Plato; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: https://authors.library.caltech.edu/41618/; https://authors.library.caltech.edu/41618/1/Moore_2012p34.pdf; https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20131002-131453985

At the summit of the Antarctic plateau, Dome A offers an intriguing location for future large scale optical astronomical observatories. The Gattini Dome A project was created to measure the optical sky brightness and large area cloud cover of the winter-time sky above this high altitude Antarctic site. The wide field camera and multi-filter system was installed on the PLATO instrument module as part of the Chinese-led traverse to Dome A in January 2008. This automated wide field camera consists of an Apogee U4000 interline CCD coupled to a Nikon fisheye lens enclosed in a heated container with glass window. The system contains a filter mechanism providing a suite of standard astronomical photometric filters (Bessell B, V, R) and a long-pass red filter for the detection and monitoring of airglow emission. The system operated continuously throughout the 2009, and 2011 winter seasons and part-way through the 2010 season, recording long exposure images sequentially for each filter. We have in hand one complete winter-time dataset (2009) returned via a manned traverse. We present here the first measurements of sky brightness in the photometric V band, cloud cover statistics measured so far and an estimate of the extinction.