DOI: 00.0000/X000000000000000X Winter sky brightness and cloud cover at Dome A, Antarctica

• Main Authors: M. G. Burton, X. Cui, N. F. H. Tothill, Anna M. Moore, Yi Yang, Jianning Fu, Michael C. B. Ashley, Xiangqun Cui, Longlong Feng, Xuefei Gong, Zhongwen Hu, Jon S. Lawrence, Daniel M. Luong-van, Reed Riddle, Geoff Sims, John W. V. Storey, Nicholas F. H. Tothill, Tony Travouillon, Lifan Wang, Huigen Yang, Ji Yang
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Antarctic; Plato; The Antarctic; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.636.4758; http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/jacara/Papers/pdf/iaus288/anna_moore_iaus288.pdf

Abstract. 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