[Aavso-photometry] Possible Bottlenecks for Using a small telescope (12" Meade LX200 ) from Antarctica

[Dirk Terrell]

On 5/13/2008 Tom Krajci wrote:
> Will you have to deal with frequent auroral activity that brightens 
> the 
> sky background?  Will you still take data then?  (I'm mostly curious 
> on 
> this matter...I have no practical experience.)

Back in the late 80's I was involved in the South Pole Optical Telescope 
(SPOT) that the University of Florida had an 8cm telescope not too far 
from the geographic south pole (a few hundred feet as I recall). This 
page has some history on the project:

http://www.southpolestation.com/trivia/history/history.html

The detector was a single-channel photometer and we had lots of problems 
with the noctilucent clouds down there. A CCD would probably be able to 
mitigate a lot of that. The South pole is about average as optical 
observatory sites go but the big appeal is the long periods of 
uninterrupted night sky that enable you to follow objects continuously 
for long periods of time.

John Oliver at UF (oliver at astro.ufl.edu) was the PI on the SPOT project 
and he would be a good person to talk to about all the engineering 
details of running a telescope in those kinds of conditions.

Dirk