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

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 ReferencesF. Falchi et al. "The new world atlas of artificial night sky brightness", Sci. Adv. 2, e1600377 (2016). CrossRef 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 M.S. Bessel, "UBVRI PASSBANDS", Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 102, 1181 (1990).. CrossRef CIE, Commision Internationale de l'Éclairage. CIE 1988 2° SpectralLuminous Efficiency Function for Photopic Vision. (Vienna, Bureau Central de la CIE, 1990) DirectLink 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 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 M.S. Bessell, "Standard Photometric Systems", Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics, 43, 293 (2005). CrossRef J.B. Oke, "Absolute Spectral Energy Distributions for White Dwarfs", The Astrophysical Journal Suppl. Series 236(27), 21 (1974). CrossRef J.B. Oke, J.E. Gunn, "Secondary standard stars for absolute spectrophotometry", The Astrophysical Journal 266, 713 (1983). CrossRef 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