Bibcode
Hill, F.; Beckers, J.; Brandt, P.; Briggs, J. W.; Brown, T.; Brown, W.; Collados, M.; Denker, C.; Fletcher, S.; Hegwer, S.; Horst, T.; Komsa, M.; Kuhn, J.; Lecinski, A.; Lin, H.; Oncley, S.; Penn, M.; Radick, R.; Rimmele, T.; Socas-Navarro, H.; Soltau, D.; Streander, K.
Bibliographical reference
American Geophysical Union, Spring Meeting 2005, abstract #SP34A-04
Advertised on:
5
2005
Citations
0
Refereed citations
0
Description
The Advanced Technology Solar Telescope (ATST) will be the world's
largest aperture solar telescope, and is being designed for high
resolution, IR, and coronal research. It must be located at a site that
maximizes the scientific return of this substantial investment. We
present the instrumentation, analysis and results of the ATST site
survey. Two instrumentation sets were deployed at each of six sites to
measure seeing as a function of height, and sky brightness as a function
of wavelength and off-limb position. Analysis software was developed to
estimate the structure function Cn2 as a function of height near the
ground, and the results were verified by comparison with in-situ
measurements. Additional software was developed to estimate the sky
brightness. The statistics of the conditions at the sites were corrected
for observing habits and the annualized hours of specific observing
conditions were estimated. These results were used to identify three
excellent sites suitable to host the ATST: Haleakala, Big Bear and La
Palma. Among them, Haleakala is proposed as the optimal location of the
ATST, La Palma and Big Bear being viable alternative sites.