Absolute photometry and Night Sky Brightness with all-sky cameras

Abstract

All-sky cameras have proven to be powerful tools to continuously monitoring the sky in a wide range of fields in both Astrophysics and Meteorology. In this work, we have developed a complete software pipeline to analyze the night CCD images obtained with one of such systems. This let us to study typical parameters used in Astrophysics to characterize the night sky quality, such as the Sky Brightness, the Cloud Coverage and the Atmospheric Extinction, how they evolve over the time and their variability. Using our software, we analyzed a large set of data from AstMon-OT all-sky camera at Teide Observatory. Results from this work have been applied in the support to the spanish CTA site proposal at Izaña, Tenerife and are being discussed within the CTA consortium. A comparison with data from other devices that have been used in site characterization such as the IAC80 telescope is also presented. This comparison is used to validate the results of the analysis of all-sky images. Finally, we test our software with AstMon-UCM and DSLR cameras. Some general recommendations for the use of DSLR cameras are provided.