The Role of Allsky Photometry in assessing an IDA Dark Sky Reserve

Presenter(s): Andrew Cool

Affiliation(s): River Murray Dark Sky Reserve

Session details: Sunday, 2020-04-12 04:00:00, SUN

Abstract

The Sky Quality Meter has long been used in assessing the darkness of the sky, but suffers from some limitations in that returns only one value for a circular FoV of 10 degrees about the Zenith, its sensor may point significantly off axis, and there are doubts about its accuracy in very dark scenarios. Allsky photometry using a calibrated DSLR and fisheye lens effectively replicates thousands of SQMs taking simultaneous readings covering the entire sky, but with the disadvantages of greater upfront cost, the need for calibration and post-processing of the image data.

Biography

Andrew Cool recently took early retirement from the Defence Science & Technology organisation after 30 years working across HF Radar, Atmospheric Gravity Waves in Airglow and using telescopes with gold-coated optics to communicate with LEO satellites using lasers. He still works part time as a Defence Contractor. He was involved in setting up the River Murray Dark Sky Reserve, is currently working on setting up the Beltana Dark Sky Sanctuary, and has been running The Heights Observatory in Adelaide since 2008 where he mentors High School students in Astronomy and practical Astrophotography. Andrew is a Member of the Astronomical Society of Australia, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, and a member of the Astronomical Society of South Australia. He has been running the astronomy weather website SkippySky since 2008.