We report on the temporal and spatial fluctuations in the atmospheric
brightness in the narrow band between Meinel emission lines at 1191.3 nm using
an R=320 near-infrared instrument. We present the instrument design and
implementation, followed by a detailed analysis of data taken over the course
of a night from Table Mountain Observatory. The absolute sky brightness at this
wavelength is found to be 5330 +/- 30 nW m^-2 sr^-1, consistent with previous
measurements of the inter-band airglow at these wavelengths. This amplitude is
larger than simple models of the continuum component of the airglow emission at
these wavelengths, confirming that an extra emissive or scattering component is
required to explain the observations. We perform a detailed investigation of
the noise properties of the data and find no evidence for a noise component
associated with temporal instability in the inter-line continuum. This result
demonstrates that in several hours of ~100s integrations the noise performance
of the instrument does not appear to significantly degrade from expectations,
giving a proof of concept that near-IR line intensity mapping may be feasible
from ground-based sites.Comment: 15 figures, submitted to PAS
