Bibcode
González-Merino, B.; Pallé, E.; Motalebi, F.; Montañés-Rodríguez, P.; Kissler-Patig, M.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 435, Issue 3, p.2574-2580
Advertised on:
11
2013
Citations
4
Refereed citations
3
Description
Observations of the Earth as a planet using the earthshine technique
(i.e. looking at the light reflected from the dark side of the Moon)
have been used for climate and astrobiology studies. They provide
information about the planetary albedo, a fundamental parameter of the
Earth's energy balance. Here we present, for the first time,
observations of the earthshine taken at high spectral resolution. The
high spectral resolution was chosen in order to investigate the
possibility of detecting metallic layers in the Earth's atmosphere of
geological or meteoritic origin. The Spettrografo Alta Risoluzione
Galileo echelle spectrograph at the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in La
Palma was used to acquire the earthshine data. Observations were carried
out on several nights in 2011 February, with the spectral resolution set
at 29 000, covering a spectral range from the near-ultraviolet (360 nm)
to near-infrared (1011.9 nm). While we find evidence for the detection
of a Na layer in the earthshine, other atomic species are not detected,
perhaps due to the low signal-to-noise ratio of the observations and the
difficult telluric corrections. The Na layer is found to vary between
observation dates, which we speculate is due to physical variations in
mesospheric Na concentrations.
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