The sky brightness and transparency in i-band at Dome A, Antarctica

• Main Authors: Hu Zou, Xu Zhou, Zhaoji Jiang, M. C. B. Ashley, Xiangqun Cui, Xuefei Gong, Jingyao Hu, C. A. Kulesa, J. S. Lawrence, Genrong Liu, D. M. Luong-van, Jun Ma, A. M. Moore, Weijia Qin, Zhaohui Shang, J. W. V. Storey, Bo Sun, T. Travouillon, C. K. Walker, Jiali Wang, Lifan Wang, Jianghua Wu, Zhenyu Wu, Lirong Xia, Jun Yan, Ji Yang, Huigen Yang, Yongqiang Yao, D. York, Zhanhai Zhang, Zhenxi Zhu
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 1001
• Subjects: Antarctic; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.296.3132; http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jacara/Papers/pdf/zou_iband.pdf

The i-band observing conditions at Dome A on the Antarctic plateau have been investigated using data acquired during 2008 with the Chinese Small Telescope ARray (CSTAR). The sky brightness, atmospheric extinction, cloud coverage and auroral appearance are obtained from these images. The median sky brightness of moonless nights is about 20.46 mag arcsec −2 in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) i band magnitude system, and the median over all brightness in the Antarctic winter is about 19.81 mag arcsec −2. There were no thick clouds in 2008, and the weather is not so good as anticipated in June and July. We 1