The Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT) is a 50-m dish antenna designed to observe in the wavelength range of 0.85 to 4 mm at an altitude of 4600 m on the summit of Sierra Negra Puebla, Mexico. The telescope has a new atmospheric monitoring system that allows technical staff and astronomers to evaluate the conditions at the site and have enough information to operate the antenna in safe conditions, atmospheric data is also useful to schedule maintenance activities and conduct scientific observations, opacity data is used to calibrate the astronomical data and evaluate the quality of the sky at millimeter wavelengths. In this paper we describe the integration of a weather atmospheric monitoring system and a 225 GHz radiometer to the facilities around the telescope and also describe the hardware integration of these systems and the software methodology used to save and process the data and then make it available in real time to the astronomers and outside world through an internet connection. Finally we present a first set of atmospheric measurements and statistics taken with this new equipment during the wet and dry seasons of 2013/2014.

Date Published: 8 July 2014
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 9147, Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V, 914730 (8 July 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2055005

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9147:
Ground-based and Airborne Instrumentation for Astronomy V
Suzanne K. Ramsay; Ian S. McLean; Hideki Takami, Editor(s)