Air Mass and Astronomy
See also: Telescope#Atmospheric_electromagnetic_opacityIn optical astronomy the air mass provides an indication of the deterioration of the observed image, not only as regards direct effects of spectral absorption, scattering and reduced brightness, but also an aggregation of visual aberrations, e.g. resulting from atmospheric turbulence, collectively referred to as the quality of the seeing. On bigger telescopes, such as the WHT (Wynne and Warsick 1988) and VLT (Avila, Rupprecht, and Becker 1997), the atmospheric dispersion can be so severe that it affects the pointing of the telescope to the target. In such cases an atmospheric dispersion compensator is used, which usually consists of two The Greenwood frequency and Fried parameter, both relevant for adaptive optics depend on the air mass above them (or more specifically, on the zenith angle).
In radio astronomy the air mass (which influences the optical path length) is not relevant. The lower layers of the atmosphere, modeled by the air mass, do not significantly impede radio waves, which are of much lower frequency than optical waves. Instead, some radio waves are affected by the ionosphere in the upper atmosphere. Newer aperture synthesis radio telescopes are especially affected by this as they “see” a much larger portion of the sky and thus the ionosphere. In fact, LOFAR needs to explicitly calibrate for these distorting effects (van der Tol and van der Veen 2007; de Vos, Gunst, and Nijboer 2009), but on the other hand can also study the ionosphere by instead measuring these distortions (Thidé 2007).
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