LuSci, a lunar scintillometer to study ground layer turbulence

• Main Authors: Jayadev Rajagopal A, A. Tokovinin A, E. Bustos A, J. Sebag B
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Seeing; Lunar scintillation; Atmospheric Turbulence; Antarctic; Antarc*
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.434.7502; http://www.ctio.noao.edu/~atokovin/papers/lusci-SPIE2008.pdf

We present a new lunar scintillometer, LuSci. A simple and accurate way to determine the Ground Layer (GL) turbulence profile is through measuring lunar and solar scintillation. The contribution of the first 10-100 m to the total seeing is usually significant. Measuring the seeing in this GL is important to evaluate sites, especially to set the height of future domes and to translate existing seeing data to higher domes. This holds in particular to Antarctic sites where the GL seeing is dominant, with obvious implications for AO and interferometry. We develop robust methods for turbulence profile restoration from LuSci data, incorporating the effect of lunar phases. We present restored profiles from initial campaigns. We also extract a simple model for the wind profile from the rich information present in the scintillation spectrum.