Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
Doi
Abstract
The high altitude Antarctic sites of Dome A and the South Pole offer intriguing locations for future large scale optical astronomical
Observatories. The Gattini project was created to measure the optical
sky brightness, large area cloud cover and aurora of the winter-time
sky above such high altitude Antarctic sites. The Gattini-DomeA camera
was installed on the PLATO instrument module as part of the Chinese-led
traverse to the highest point on the Antarctic plateau in January 2008.
This single automated wide field camera contains a suite of Bessel
photometric filters (B, V, R) and a long-pass red filter for the
detection and monitoring of OH emission. We have in hand one complete
winter-time dataset (2009) from the camera that was recently returned
in April 2010.
The Gattini-South Pole UV camera is a wide-field optical camera that in
2011 will measure for the first time the UV properties of the
winter-time sky above the South Pole dark sector. This unique dataset
will consist of frequent images taken in both broadband U and B filters
in addition to high resolution (R similar to 5000) long slit
spectroscopy over a narrow bandwidth of the central field. The camera
is a proof of concept for the 2m-class Antarctic Cosmic Web Imager
telescope, a dedicated experiment to directly detect and map the
redshifted lyman alpha fluorescence or Cosmic Web emission we believe
possible due to the unique geographical qualities of the site.
We present the current status of both projects
