System design and initial results of all sky imager at South Pole

• Main Authors: Masaki Okada, Masaki Ejiri, Shoichi Okano, Makoto Taguchi, Shu Takeshita
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English; Japanese
• Published: National Institute of Polar Research 1997
• Subjects: Geography (General); G1-922; Amundsen Scott South Pole Station; Amundsen-Scott; Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station; Austral; South Pole; South pole
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.15094/00009010; https://doaj.org/article/fec4d9326dc54c41b10c97eb7c4dd668

We have developed an all-sky optical imager (ASI) which was installed at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station (SP) in the 1996-1997 austral summer season. ASI consists of a highly sensitive (monochromatic and panchromatic) optical lens, CCD camera, and a data-taking workstation. The ASI is equipped with interference filters of N_2^+ 427.8nm, Ol 630.0nm, and OH 730.0nm. The image sensor is a back-illuminated air-cooled CCD camera with 512×512 pixels. The size of each pixel is 24μm×24μm. The workstation (WS) is controlled from NIPR via the internet and stores the image data to a digital linear tape (DLT) drive. Selected image data can be sent to NIPR via the Internet during the observational period. We present the detailed system configuration, the data formats and the initial images taken by the ASI-SP system.