All Sky Camera, LIDAR and Electric Field Meter: auxiliary instruments for the ASTRI SST-2M prototype

TL;DR

This paper discusses the deployment and current status of auxiliary atmospheric monitoring instruments—All Sky Camera, Electric Field Meter, and Raman Lidar—at the ASTRI SST-2M telescope site, with potential applications for CTA.

Contribution

It presents the integration and preliminary use of auxiliary atmospheric instruments at the ASTRI SST-2M site, with methods applicable to future CTA installations.

Findings

Instruments successfully installed and operational at Serra La Nave.

Data analysis techniques under development for atmospheric monitoring.

Potential for applying these methods at CTA sites.

Abstract

ASTRI SST-2M is the end-to-end prototype telescope of the Italian National Institute of Astro- physics, INAF, designed to investigate the 10-100 TeV band in the framework of the Cherenkov Telescope Array, CTA. The ASTRI SST-2M telescope has been installed in Italy in September 2014, at the INAF ob- serving station located at Serra La Nave on Mount Etna. The telescope is foreseen to be completed and fully operative in spring 2015 including auxiliary instrumentation needed to support both operations and data anal- ysis. In this contribution we present the current status of a sub-set of the auxiliary instruments that are being used at the Serra La Nave site, namely an All Sky Camera, an Electric Field Meter and a Raman Lidar devoted, together with further instrumentation, to the monitoring of the atmospheric and environmental conditions. The data analysis techniques under development for these instruments could be applied at the CTA sites, where similar auxiliary instrumentation will be installed.