Sky Quality Meter “LU-DL-V”

Description

A USB enabled data-logging light meter for night-time sky brightness monitoring!

An affordable meter for continual, connected or autonomous data-logging to measure sky brightness for astronomers and light pollution investigators.

The “Sky Quality Meter – LU-DL-V”  measures the brightness of the night sky in magnitudes per square arcsecond.

Uses:

• Measuring the night sky brightness during remote biological field experiments.
• Find out how good the night or site REALLY is.
• Compare the sky brightness at different sites quantitatively.
• Document the evolution of light pollution in your area.
• Set planetarium dome illumination to mimic the skies people are likely to experience elsewhere in the city.
• Monitor sky brightness through the night, night-to-night, and year-to-year.
• Determine which nights show the greatest promise for finding the ‘faintest fuzzies’!
• Calibrate the effect of sky brightness on qualitative measures such as the Bortle Scale.
• Investigate how sky brightness correlates with the solar cycle and month-to-month sunspot activity.
• Help provide local ground truth for future sky brightness prediction with the http://www.cleardarksky.com
• CCD users can make a correlation between the SQM reading and when the background reaches some ADC level.

Features:

• Sky brightness reported in visual magnitudes per square arcsecond.
• Infrared blocking filter restricts measurement to visual bandpass.
• Sensor temperature, model number, and serial number are provided.
• Precision readings at even the darkest sites.
• Field-upgradeable firmware.
• Open protocol document.

Specifications:

• USB connectivity
• Included applications for reading data in Perl.
• The Half Width Half Maximum (HWHM) of the angular sensitivity is ~10°. The Full Width Half Maximum (FWHM) is then ~20°. The sensitivity to a point source ~19° off-axis is a factor of 10 lower than on-axis. A point source ~20° and ~40° off-axis would register 3.0 and 5.0 magnitudes fainter, respectively.
• Size 5.5 x 2.6 x 1.1 in.
• Maximum light sampling time: 80 seconds.
• Minimum light sampling time: 1 seconds.
• Specifications are subject to change without notice.

• Battery-to-USB type “B”adapter with 4 AA cells and battery holder