Sky Quality Meter-LR

An affordable RS232-meter for continual, connected measuring sky brightness for astronomers! The "Sky Quality Meter-LR" measures the brightness of the night sky in magnitudes per square arcsecond with unprecedented sensitivity in a handheld meter!

Uses

• Find out how good the night or site really is.
• Compare the sky brightness at different sites quantitatively.
• Document the evolution of light pollution in your area.
• Monitor sky brightness through the night, night-to-night, and year-to-year.
• Determine which nights show the greatest promise for finding the 'faintest fuzzies'!
• Calibrate the effect of sky brightness on qualitative measures such as the Bortle Scale.
• Investigate how sky brightness correlates with the solar cycle and month-to-month sunspot activity.
• CCD users can make a correlation between the SQM reading and when the background reaches some ADC level.

Deployment

• Legacy computer interface installations.
• MODEM interface installations.
• Simple electronic interface projects.

Features

• Sky brightness displayed in visual magnitudes per square arcsecond.
• Infrared blocking filter restricts measurement to visual bandpass.
• Temperature in both Celsius and Fahrenheit as well as model number and serial number can be displayed with different button press sequence.
• Precision readings at even the darkest sites.
• Field-upgradeable firmware
• Open protocol document.
• RS232 connectivity
• Included applications for reading data in Perl.
• The Half Width Half Maximum (HWHM) of the angular sensitivity is ~10°.
• The sensitivity to a point source ~19° off-axis is a factor of 10 lower than on-axis.
• Maximum light sampling time: 80 seconds.
• Minimum light sampling time: 1 seconds.

Delivery contents

• Sky Quality Meter-LR
  
• Users manual
  
• Software
  
• 6ft RS232 straight through cable
  
• International AC adapter
  
• Calibration sheet indicating calibration values