The Dome C Gattini sky brightness cameras: results from the first year of operation

¹ Caltech Optical Observatories, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91106, USA
² School of Physics, University of New South Wales, NSW 2052, Australia
³ LUAN, Université de Nice, Parc Valrose, 06108 Nice Cedex 2, France
⁴ School of Physics, University of Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
⁵ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Roma La Sapienza, Roma, Italy
⁶ Dipartimento di Fisica, Università di Perugia, via A. Pascoli, 06123 Perugia, Italy
⁷ IFSI – INAF, Rome, Italy
⁸ INAF – Osservatorio Astrofisico di Catania, via S. Sofia 78, 95123 Catania, Italy
⁹ INAF – Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri, Largo Enrico Fermi 5, Firenze 50125, Italy
¹⁰ OAMP/LAM, 2 place Le Verrier, Marseille Cedex 4, France
¹¹ INAF – Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova, Padova, Italy
¹² California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91106, USA

Abstract

The Gattini-DomeC project, part of the IRAIT site testing campaign and ongoing since January 2006, consists of two cameras for the measurement of optical sky brightness, large area cloud cover, and auroral detection above the DomeC site, home of the French-Italian Concordia station. The cameras are transit in nature and are virtually identical except for the nature of the lenses. The cameras have operated throughout the past two Antarctic winter seasons and here we present the results obtained from the 2006 winter-time dataset of the wide field “All-sky camera".