Bibcode
Vernin, J.; Munoz-Tunon, C.
Bibliographical reference
Astronomy and Astrophysics (ISSN 0004-6361), vol. 257, no. 2, p. 811-816.
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4
1992
Citations
63
Refereed citations
48
Description
The results of one night of observations corresponding to an intensive
site assessment campaign, held at the Observatorio del Roque de los
Muchachos (La Palma) on July 22 1990, are presented and discussed. The
goal of the campaign was to evaluate the contribution of free
atmosphere, boundary layer, surface layer and dome + mirror seeing to
image degradation at the Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT). To fulfill this
objective the Scidar instrument was adapted to the NOT focus, while
launched balloons and an instrumented mast were used to evaluate the
extra-dome seeing. Although the seeing measurements reported here result
from a single night of observations only, and thus have no statistical
bearing on the seeing quality at La Palma, they nevertheless revealed a
potentially excellent site; seeing contributions of respectively 0.08,
0.50, and 0.40 arcsec were measured for the surface layer, boundary
layer and free atmosphere, with a resulting net effect of 0.69 arcsec.
At the beginning of the night, extremely good seeing conditions (about
0.5 arcsec) where encountered at the NOT focus, demonstrating that,
compared to the atmospheric conditions, there was virtually no
significant dome and mirror seeing contributing to the image
degradation.