Exceptional astronomical seeing conditions above Dome C in Antarctica

Jon S. Lawrence, Michael C. B. Ashley (), Andrei Tokovinin and Tony Travouillon
Additional contact information
Jon S. Lawrence: University of New South Wales
Michael C. B. Ashley: University of New South Wales
Andrei Tokovinin: Cerro-Tololo Inter American Observatory
Tony Travouillon: University of New South Wales

Nature, 2004, vol. 431, issue 7006, 278-281

Abstract: Abstract One of the most important considerations when planning the next generation of ground-based optical astronomical telescopes is to choose a site that has excellent ‘seeing’—the jitter in the apparent position of a star that is caused by light bending as it passes through regions of differing refractive index in the Earth's atmosphere. The best mid-latitude sites have a median seeing ranging from 0.5 to 1.0 arcsec (refs 1–5). Sites on the Antarctic plateau have unique atmospheric properties that make them worth investigating as potential observatory locations. Previous testing at the US Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station has, however, demonstrated poor seeing, averaging 1.8 arcsec (refs 6, 7). Here we report observations of the wintertime seeing from Dome C (ref. 8), a high point on the Antarctic plateau at a latitude of 75° S. The results are remarkable: the median seeing is 0.27 arcsec, and below 0.15 arcsec 25 per cent of the time. A telescope placed at Dome C would compete with one that is 2 to 3 times larger at the best mid-latitude observatories, and an interferometer based at this site could work on projects that would otherwise require a space mission.

Date: 2004
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature02929 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:431:y:2004:i:7006:d:10.1038_nature02929

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/nature02929

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().