Sky Brightness Analysis using a Million Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep Space Surveillance (GEODSS) Observations

摘要

Brightness of the sky background due to lunar phase and location can dramatically affect the limiting magnitude of astronomical detectors. Formerly, theoretical models have attained-limited data sets with 10 - 20% differences between model and observation. This paper compares and contrasts previous investigations with over a million data points collected from various GEODSS sites located around the world, and attempts to refine predictive modeling of sky brightness for use in scheduling, as well as modeling and simulation tools.