Thermal Infrared Sky Background for a High-Arctic Mountain Observatory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Nighttime zenith sky spectral brightness in the 3.3–20 μm wavelength region is reported for an observatory site nearby Eureka on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic. Measurements are derived from an automated Fourier-transform spectrograph that operated there continuously over three consecutive winters. During that time, the median through the most transparent portion of the Q window was 460 Jy arcsec^-2, falling below 32 Jy arcsec^-2 in the N band, and to sub-Jansky levels by M and shortward, reaching only 36 mJy arcsec^-2 within L. Nearly six decades of twice-daily balloonsonde launches from Eureka, together with contemporaneous meteorological data plus a simple model, allows characterization of background stability and extrapolation into K band. This suggests that the study location has dark skies across the whole thermal infrared spectrum, typically sub-200 μJy arcsec^-2 at 2.4 μm. That background is comparable to South Pole and more than an order of magnitude less than estimates for the best temperate astronomical sites, all at much higher elevation. Considerations relevant to future facilities, including for polar transient surveys, are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".