Seasonal and Day–Night Analysis of Paranal Seeing

Conduct a seasonal analysis of daytime seeing on the VLT platform and cross-match the daytime measurements collected by the SHABAR system with nighttime measurements collected by the ESO DIMM system.

Background

The reported SHABAR measurements were obtained in late autumn and early winter in Chile, when lower temperatures likely reduced the daily temperature increase and associated turbulence. The authors therefore caution that seasonal changes may produce seeing values larger than those measured during the initial observing period.

A seasonal analysis would characterize how daytime seeing varies throughout the year, while a cross-match with ESO DIMM nighttime measurements would enable comparison between daytime and nighttime atmospheric conditions at the VLT platform. Both analyses are explicitly identified as future work rather than completed investigations.

References

We leave for future work a seasonal analysis of the daytime seeing in the VLT platform, coupled with a cross-match between the daytime measurements collected by our SHABAR system and the nighttime ones collected through the DIMM system, as provided by ESO.

— Daytime seeing variations in Paranal through a SHABAR system. Description of the method and first measurements from the PoET solar telescope  (2609.20479 - Silva et al., 17 Sep 2026) in Section 'Conclusions and discussion' (Section 5)