Gattini 2010: Cutting Edge Science at the Bottom of the World

• Main Authors: Anna M. Moore A, Sara Ahmed B, Michael C. B. Ashley C, Max K. Barreto D, Xiangqun Cui E, Delacroix A, Longlong Feng F, Xuefei Gong E, Jon Lawrence C, Daniel M. Luong-van C, Christopher Martin B, Reed Riddle A, Nicole Rowley I, Zhaohui Shang F, John W. V. Storey C, Nick F, H. Tothill C, Tony Travouillon B, Lifan Wang F, Huigen Yang F, Ji Yang G, Xu Zhou F, Zhengxi Zhu F
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; Plato; South Pole; The Antarctic; Antarc*; South pole
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.296.9654; http://mcba11.phys.unsw.edu.au/~plato/papers/moo10a.pdf

The high altitude Antarctic sites of Dome A and the South Pole offer intriguing locations for future large scale optical astronomical Observatories. The Gattini project was created to measure the optical sky brightness, large area cloud cover and aurora of the winter-time sky above such high altitude Antarctic sites. The Gattini- DomeA camera was installed on the PLATO instrument module as part of the Chinese-led traverse to the highest point on the Antarctic plateau in January 2008. This single automated wide field camera contains a suite of Bessel photometric filters (B, V, R) and a long-pass red filter for the detection and monitoring of OH emission. We have in hand one complete winter-time dataset (2009) from the camera that was recently returned in April 2010. The Gattini-South Pole UV camera is a wide-field optical camera that in 2011 will measure for the first time the UV properties of the winter-time sky above the South Pole dark sector. This unique dataset will consist of frequent images