Vol. 5, issue 12, article # 9

Abstract:

The quality of vision and scintillations have been simultaneously recorded with identical instrumentation during several nights at two astronomical observatories in Chile (Las Campanas and La Silla) located along the prevailing wind direction some ten kilometers apart. High correlation between the observed signals has shown that the atmospheric turbulence keeps its structure at a long distance.
Based on this studied property of the atmospheric turbulence it is possible to make a short–term (for several hours) forecast of the visibility conditions for the ground–based observatories. Such a forecasting can be very useful when making a timetable for observations with a modern ground–based telescope.
This problem is now being studied at the South European Observatory as part of the programme on development of the Astronomic Weather Station for the Very Big Telescope (VBT).