SUPER-SEEING SITES IN THE CANADIAN HIGH ARCTIC
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The potential of polar regions for astronomy has long been recognized and first highlighted with measurements of exceptional seeing in Antarctica. On the basis of satellite data and topography we identified the western part of Ellesmere Island as having potential comparable to the Antarctic sites. Preliminary site seeing measurements find that Ellesmere has sites superior to the best known mid-latitude ones and does not suffer from the substantial ground layer of Antarctic plateau sites. The site characterization is ongoing and is a very high priority, but it is clear that Canadians have an opportunity to develop an internationally competitive observatory site in the High Arctic. One immediate possibility is to develop an essentially diffraction limited optical infrared 2m class telescope. The site itself would be beneficial for telescopes of a wide range of apertures operating in the optical, IR, and sub-mm, and radio spectrum, although the increased costs will always need to be considered. Subject headings: site testing - telescopes - instrumentation:adaptive optics Essentially all astronomical observations are improved with better resolved images, stable PSFs, and lower backgrounds.The potential of the Arctic and Antarctic as sites for astronomical observatories has long been recognized on the basis of very low precipitable water vapor and that the inversion layer in the atmosphere is at very low elevation. A recent development is experimental proof that the astronomical “seeing” (the image motion due to small turbulence induced index of refraction changes in the air) is exceptionally good in the Antarctic above the ground layer (Lawrence et al. 2004). It was subsequently determined that the flat terrain that surrounds the domes of Antarctica created an unfortunate, but fully expected, turbulent ground layer that degraded the seeing below 100 to 200m to good but not truly exceptional seeing. Mountains in the Canadian Far North have conditions comparable to the antarctic ice plateau, and in some ways are superior. Mountain ranges in the Eastern Arctic archipelago are of particular interest, having many summits between 1000 and 1900 m that project into the free
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".