Optical turbulence at Ali, China – results from the first year of lunar scintillometer observations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT The location of an astronomical observatory is a key factor that affects its scientific productivity. The best astronomical sites are generally those found at high altitudes. Several such sites in western China and the Tibetan plateau are presently under development for astronomy. One of these is Ali, which, at over 5000 m, is one of the highest astronomical sites in the world. In order to further investigate the astronomical potential of Ali, we have installed a lunar scintillometer, for the primary purpose of profiling atmospheric turbulence. This paper describes the instrument and technique, and reports results from the first year of observations. We find that ground layer (GL) turbulence at Ali is remarkably weak and relatively thin. The median seeing, from turbulence in the range 11–500 m above ground, is 0.34 arcsec, with seeing better than 0.26 arcsec occurring 25 per cent of the time. Under median conditions, half of the GL turbulence lies below a height of 62 m. These initial results, and the high altitude and relatively low temperatures, suggest that Ali could prove to be an outstanding site for ground-based astronomy.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".