Nigel
As part of the 2009 servicing mission of PLATO, Nigel was deployed to Dome A by the Polar Research Institute of China (PRIC). The Nigel instrument was both a site-testing and scientific instrument designed to measure the optical sky brightness and the aurora contributions of the Dome A sky.
Nigel was a fibre-fed UV/Visible spectrometer coupled with a thermo-electrically cooled 256 × 1024 CCD camera: see S.L. Kenyon et al., Proc. SPIE, 6267, (2006), 62671M-1.
Three pairs of fibres were pointing in three fixed positions of north (40° Elev.), west (71.5° Elev.) and zenith. Each fibre, with a field-of-view of ~22.5°, is attached to the inside of a stainless steel sphere, which is mounted to the roof of the instrument module. One optical fibre of each pair incorporates an inline filter to remove wavelengths short of 515nm, thus ensuring no second-order contamination at the red end of the spectrum for these fibres. All six fibres are fed into a commercial imaging spectrometer (Jobin Yvon model CP200) with a concave holographic diffraction grating of 200 grooves per millimetre. The dispersed image is captured by an Andor CCD camera.
A false-color CCD image showing the individual spectra corresponding to each of the six optical fibres. The wavelength decreases from left to right (~820nm to ~300nm). The top pair, middle pair, and bottom pair of spectra correspond to the zenith fibres, the west fibres, and the north fibres respectively.
Refereed papers
- Sims, G., Ashley, M. C. B., Cui, X., Everett, J. R., Feng, L., Gong, X., Hengst, S., Hu, Z., Lawrence, J. S., Luong-Van, D. M., Moore, A. M., Riddle, R., Shang, Z., Storey, J. W. V., Tothill, N., Travouillon, T., Wang, L., Yang, H., Yang, J., Zhou, X., and Zhu, Z., 2012, Airglow and Aurorae at Dome A, Antarctica, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 124, 637–649.
- Sims, G., Ashley, M. C. B., Cui, X., Everett, J. R., Feng, L., Gong, X., Hengst, S., Hu, Z., Kulesa, C., Lawrence, J. S., Luong-van, D. M., Ricaud, P., Shang, Z., Storey, J. W. V., Wang, L., Yang, H., Yang, J., Zhou, X., and Zhu, Z., 2012, Precipitable Water Vapor above Dome A, Antarctica, Determined from Diffuse Optical Sky Spectra, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 124, 74–83.
SPIE instrumentation papers from Nigel at Dome A
- Geoff Sims, Michael C. B. Ashley, Xiangqun Cui, Jon R. Everett, LongLong Feng, Xuefei Gong, Shane Hengst, Zhongwen Hu, Jon S. Lawrence, Daniel M. Luong-van, Zhaohui Shang, John W. V. Storey, Lifan Wang, Huigen Yang, Ji Yang, Xu Zhou, and Zhenxi Zhu, 2010, Optical sky brightness at Dome A, Antarctica, from the Nigel experiment, Proc. SPIE, 7733, 77334M–77334M-9.