On the Relation between the Astronomical and Visual Photometric Systems in Specifying the Brightness of the Night Sky for Mesopically Adapted Observers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Due to the typical ambient light levels in inhabited places and light pollution of the night sky, most naked-eye astronomical observations are performed nowadays under mesopic conditions. The luminance (cd/m2) associated with the brightness of the night sky specified in the astronomical logarithmic scale of magnitudes per square arcsecond (mag/arcsec2) is strongly dependent on the spectrum of the sky, because the spectral sensitivity of the human visual system is not coincident with the standard photometric bands used in astronomy. The conversion between these two families of photometric systems was previously analyzed for observers presumed to be either fully photopically or scotopically adapted. In this work, we deduce the transformation equations between the astronomical and visual photometric systems for specifying and reporting the sky brightness in the mesopic range, within the framework of the MES-2 system for visual performance-based mesopic photometry. It is shown that the dependence of the conversion factors on the correlated color temperature of the night sky reaches a minimum spread for adaptation luminances of 0.5–1.0 cd/m2. The sky luminances corresponding to 22.0 mag/arcsec2 in the Johnson-Cousins V band (the assumed brightness of a natural night sky devoid of light pollution) span, for 1.0 cd/m2 adaptation, a relatively small range of ~195–215 μcd/m2 in the absolute (AB) magnitude system and ~210–225 μcd/m2 in the Vega-referenced one.