An alternative to Tregenza's recent scanning pattern for sky photometry is presented and discussed. Tregenza has described an ingenious method of packing the surface of a hemisphere with a large number of identical circular caps in such a way as to cover, in parallel bands, without overlap, the largest possible proportion of the hemisphere surface. The resulting array of circular caps defines a
... [Show full abstract] pattern of aiming points, and the (constant) acceptance angle, for a photometer programmed to sample the directional luminance of the sky vault. This note reports a packing study for the same application, but the requirement for identical caps is relaxed; caps at different altitudes may have different diameters.