The Diffuse Ultraviolet Foreground Jayant Murthy1 Abstract the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX ) in two bands Ultraviolet observations from low Earth orbit (LEO) (FUV: 1531 A˚ and NUV: 2321 A)˚ with observations far have to deal with a foreground comprised of airglow and from the Sun to minimize foreground emission. zodiacal light which depend on the look direction and Despite these drawbacks, we have used the GALEX on the date and time of the observation. We have used data to derive empirical formulae for the foreground all-sky observations from the GALEX spacecraft to find sources. Although our main interest is in better un- that the airglow may be divided into a baseline depen- derstanding the galactic and extragalactic diffuse radi- dent on the sun angle and a component dependent only ation, we hope that our results will also prove useful in on the time from local midnight. The zodiacal light is studies of the Earth's atmosphere and of the zodiacal observable only in the near ultraviolet band (2321 A)˚ light. They will certainly prove useful in mission plan- of GALEX and is proportional to the zodiacal light in ning for other space-borne instruments such as the Ul- the visible but with a color of 0.65 indicating that the traviolet Imaging Telescope (Kumar et al. 2012) which dust grains are less reflective in the UV. will observe the sky with large field of view instruments where diffuse radiation limits the observable sky. Keywords atmospheric effects; diffuse radiation; ul- traviolet: general; zodiacal dust 2 Observations & Data 1 Introduction 2.1 Observations Measurements of the diffuse ultraviolet (UV) radiation field have to contend with a number of contaminat- The GALEX spacecraft was launched in 2003 and has ing sources including atmospheric emission lines and since observed about 75% of the sky in two spectral the zodiacal light (Murthy 2009). These foreground bands (FUV: 1531 A˚ and NUV: 2321 A)˚ with a spatial sources are particularly important at high galactic lat- resolution of about 500 over a field of view of 0.6◦. The itudes where the Galactic contribution to the radiation arXiv:1307.5232v2 [astro-ph.IM] 8 Mar 2014 primary mission was described by Martin et al. (2005) field is relatively small and at longer wavelengths where and the software and data products by Morrissey et al. the zodiacal light, which follows the solar spectrum, be- (2007). Most of the GALEX observations were short comes increasingly important. It has been difficult to exposures of about 100 seconds in length (All-Sky Imag- disentangle these components, largely because of a lack ing Survey: AIS) but there were a number of longer of relevant observations. Ideally, these would be spec- observations of 10,000 seconds or more, either to ful- troscopic observations with moderate resolutions over fill specific mission objectives or taken as part of the a large part of the sky with different sun angles. How- Guest Investigator (GI) program. A single exposure ever, what we have is thousands of observations from was limited by the duration of the orbital night (about 1000 seconds) and longer observations were broken up Jayant Murthy into a series of exposures spread over a time period Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bangalore 560034, India ranging from days to years. GALEX observations were [email protected] subject to severe selection effects due to brightness re- lated constraints from the diffuse radiation integrated 2 2300 we obtained the TLEs (two-line elements) from Space- ) Track.org (https://www.space-track.org/) and then -1 Å used STK (http://www.agi.com/default.aspx) to -1 2100 sr calculate the latitude and longitude of the spacecraft -1 s -2 ground track at a given UT. From this we calculated the 1900 local spacecraft time and cross-indexed with the TEC to obtain the total emission as a function of time. As a result of this rather painful experience, we would recom- 1700 FUV TEC (ph cm FUV mend that future missions include the local spacecraft coordinates as part of their standard data products. There were about 34,000 observations in each of the 1500 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6 FUV and NUV bands in the GALEX GR6 data release Observation Time (UT) with close to 76,000 scst files and 14,000,000 individ- ual TEC measurements in each band. Note that the Fig. 1 The Total Event Counter (TEC) as a function of longer exposures were divided into multiple exposures UT. The minimum emission was at local (spacecraft) mid- night. and hence multiple scst files. 2.2 Airglow over the large field of view. Thus the Galactic plane and other high intensity regions such as Orion or the Naturally enough, most observations of the airglow Magellanic Clouds could not be observed in the origi- from space have been downward looking and have found nal mission. Recent observations have covered many of a number of different atomic and molecular lines (re- these but they will not help in refining the foreground viewed by Meier (1991)). There are many fewer ob- because of the brightness of the astrophysical emission. servations looking up from low-Earth orbit (LEO). The Observations were only taken at orbital night between only emission lines observable in the night spectrum are 20:00 and 04:00 (local time) and only in directions more the geocoronal O I lines at 1304 A˚ (0.013 kR) and 1356 ◦ than 90 from the Sun to minimize airglow and zodia- A˚ (0.001 kR) in the FUV band and 2471 A(˚ < 0:001 cal light. Hence, we only sampled a limited part of the kR) in the NUV band (Morrison et al. 1992; Feldman total phase space of observational parameters. et al. 1992; Boffi et al. 2007). The GALEX FUV band The diffuse background is the sum of the galactic rejected the 1304 A˚ line but with a 10% leak (Morrissey background, which depends only on the look direction, et al. 2007) and these values corresponded to expected and the foreground emission | airglow and zodiacal levels of about 200 photons cm−2 s−1 sr−1 A˚−1 in the light | which depends on the time and date of the ob- FUV band and 100 photons cm−2 s−1 sr−1 A˚−1 in the servation. The standard data products include a single NUV band. image of the targeted field for each of the two bands As mentioned above, we have adopted an empiri- (the FUV detector failed in May, 2009 following which cal approach in studying the foreground emission. We observations were made only with the NUV detector) noted that each observation could be separated into two and a merged catalog of point sources from both bands. parts; a minimum value at orbital midnight and a time- Because we are trying to derive the foreground emis- variable part which increased smoothly on either side of sion which is a function of time and date of the obser- orbital midnight (Figure 1). The only possible source vation, we used the spacecraft housekeeping files (scst for a signal that varies with the local time is airglow and files) which included the total count rate (TEC: Total we extracted this component of the foreground emission Event Count) in each of the two detectors. The TEC by subtracting a baseline calculated from the average of was tabulated every second and was tied to the UT the points within 15 minutes of local midnight, assum- (universal time) of the observation. A typical TEC is ing that the observation included this time span. This plotted with respect to UT in Figure 1. baseline is comprised of all other sources in the field, As implied by its name, the TEC includes all emis- including any residual airglow emission at midnight. sion in the field of view including starlight, diffuse back- There were approximately 5.8 million independent ground, airglow, and zodiacal light and each element points in the FUV channel and 6.6 million in the NUV had to be estimated separately. However, only the channel with an overlap of about 5 million points. We airglow would be expected to vary with the time of gridded the baseline-subtracted data to form a density day and, to anticipate our results, specifically with the plot for each band and these are shown in Figure 2. time from local midnight. Unfortunately, this was not These plots were created by gridding the data into bins readily available from the GALEX data products and 3 250 250 ) –1 ) Å -1 –1 Å -1 sr –1 sr s 150 –1 150 –2 s –2 50 50 FUV TEC (photons cm FUV NUV TEC (photons cm NUV –50 –50 –5 –3 –1 1 3 5 –5 –3 –1 1 3 5 Time from Midnight Time from Midnight Fig. 2 Distribution of FUV (a) and NUV (b) baseline-subtracted airglow. Plus signs (+) show the peak of the distribution and the contour lines represent the 1σ limits on the level of the airglow. The dark line is the parametrized fit to the peak airglow. of 10 minutes in time and 10 photons cm−2 s−1 sr−1 (Kelsall et al. 1998) from the Infrared Astronomy Satel- A˚−1 in flux. The plus signs show the peak airglow at lite (IRAS) mission. It is generally assumed that the a given time and the 1σ contour is shown as the closed spectrum of the zodiacal light follows the Solar spec- line; that is, 68% of the data points fall within the two trum; that is, the color of the zodiacal light is unity.