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Temporal variability of the seeing of TMT sites

2008; SPIE; Volume: 7012; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1117/12.787136

1996-756X

Tony Travouillon, S. Els, Reed Riddle, Matthias Schöck, A. W. Skidmore, E. Bustos, Juan Seguel, David Walker, J. Vasquez, Robert Blum, P. Gillett, Brooke Gregory,

Adaptive optics and wavefront sensing

Seeing stability is an important criterion of site characterization. Two sites, with the same seeing statistics, could in principle differ in their temporal stability and hence have their observatories perform differently. Temporal variability can, however, be defined in several ways, all of which may determine the performance of the observatories in different manner. In this paper, we propose three methods to measure variability each focusing on different applications: Selection (maximization of observation time), Image quality (seeing variation within a given integration time) and finally Scheduling (prediction of seeing fluctuation on a given time scale). We apply these methods to the seeing of the TMT candidate sites to determine their stability properties.