Unihedron Sky Quality Meter – USB

The USB Sky Quality Meter – LU by Unihedron:Are you ready for an affordable sky quality meter for continual, connected measuring of sky brightness for astronomers? Then welcome in the USB “Sky Quality Meter – LU” by Unihedron. It measures the brightness of the night sky in magnitudes per square arcsecond!

Find out how good the night or site REALLY is and compare the sky brightness at different sites quantitatively. The new Unihedron USB Sky Quality Meter- LU will allow you to document the evolution of light pollution in your area. Now you can set planetarium dome illumination to mimic the skies people are likely to experience elsewhere in the city. You can monitor sky brightness through the night, night-to-night, and year-to-year… even determine which nights show the greatest promise for finding the faintest fuzzies! Just take a look at what you get… Do the science! Calibrate the effect of sky brightness on qualitative measures such as the Bortle Scale and investigate how sky brightness correlates with the solar cycle and month-to-month sunspot activity. With the Unihedron USB Sky Quality Meter – LU, you can help provide local ground truth for future sky brightness prediction with the Clear Sky Clock and CCD users can make a correlation between the SQM reading and when the background reaches some ADC level.

Unihedron USB Sky Quality Meter – LU 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 and open protocol document.
• USB connectivity including applications for reading data in Perl.
• The Half Width Half Maximum (HWHM) of the angular sensitivity is ~10 degrees.
• The Full Width Half Maximum (FWHM) is then ~20 degrees.
• The sensitivity to a point source ~19 degrees off-axis is a factor of 10 lower than on-axis.
• A point source ~20 degrees and ~40 degrees off-axis would register 3.0 and 5.0 magnitudes fainter, respectively.
• Size 3.6 x 2.6 x 1.1-inches.
• Maximum light sampling time: 80 seconds – Minimum light sampling time: 1 seconds.
• Specifications are subject to change without notice.

OPT Product Number: UH-SQM-LU