Black-body luminance and magnitudes per square arcsecond in the Johnson-Cousins BVR photometric bands

Authors

  • Salvador Bara

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4302/plp.v11i3.926

Abstract

A relevant amount of light pollution studies deal with the unwanted visual effects of artificial light at night, including the anthropogenic luminance of the sky that hinders the observation of the celestial bodies which are a main target of ground-based astrophysical research, and a key asset of the intangible heritage of humankind. Most quantitative measurements and numerical models, however, evaluate the anthropogenic sky radiance in any of the standard Johnson-Cousins UBVRI photometric bands, generally in the V one. Since the Johnson-Cousins V band is not identical with the visual CIE V() used to assess luminance, the conversion between these two photometric systems turns out to be spectrum-dependent. Given its interest for practical applications, in this Letter we provide the framework to perform this conversion and the transformation constants for black-body spectra of different absolute temperatures.

Full Text: PDF

References
  1. F. Falchi et al. "The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness", Sci. Adv. 2, e1600377 (2016). CrossRef
  2. M. Kocifaj, "A review of the theoretical and numerical approaches to modeling skyglow: Iterative approach to RTE, MSOS, and two-stream approximation", Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy & Radiative Transfer 181, 2 (2016). CrossRef
  3. M.S. Bessel, "UBVRI PASSBANDS", Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 102, 1181 (1990).. CrossRef
  4. CIE, Commision Internationale de l'Éclairage. CIE 1988 2° SpectralLuminous Efficiency Function for Photopic Vision. (Vienna, Bureau Central de la CIE, 1990) DirectLink
  5. S. Bará, "Variations on a classical theme: On the formal relationship between magnitudes per square arcsecond and luminance", International Journal of Sustainable Lighting IJSL 19(2), 104 (2017). CrossRef
  6. A. Sánchez de Miguel, M. Aubé, J. Zamorano, M. Kocifaj, J. Roby, C. Tapia. "Sky Quality Meter measurements in a colour-changing world", Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 467(3), 2966 (2017). CrossRef
  7. M.S. Bessell, "Standard Photometric Systems", Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 43, 293 (2005). CrossRef
  8. J.B. Oke, "Absolute Spectral Energy Distributions for White Dwarfs", The Astrophysical Journal Suppl. Series 236(27), 21 (1974). CrossRef
  9. J.B. Oke, J.E. Gunn, "Secondary standard stars for absolute spectrophotometry", The Astrophysical Journal 266, 713 (1983). CrossRef
  10. M.R. Blanton, S. Roweis S., "K-Corrections and Filter Transformations in the Ultraviolet, Optical, and Near-Infrared", The Astronomical Journal, 133(2), 734(2007). Table 1. CrossRef

Downloads

Published

2019-09-30

How to Cite

[1]
S. Bara, “Black-body luminance and magnitudes per square arcsecond in the Johnson-Cousins BVR photometric bands”, Photonics Lett. Pol., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 63–65, Sep. 2019.

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 3 (2019)

Section

Articles

License

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).