Related papers: Probing micro-arcsec astrometry with NACO
The astrometric calibration of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is described. For point sources brighter than r ~ 20 the astrometric accuracy is 45 milliarcseconds (mas) rms per coordinate when reduced against the USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog,…
The low infrared background and high atmospheric transparency are the principal advantages of Antarctic Plateau sites for astronomy. However, the poor seeing (between one and three arcseconds) negates much of the sensitivity improvements…
Space astrometry is capable of sub-microarcsecond measurements of star positions. A hundred visits over several years could yield relative astrometric precision of ~0.1 uas, below the astrometric signature (0.3 uas) of a Sun-Earth system at…
Intensity interferometry removes the stringent requirements on mechanical precision and atmospheric corrections that plague all amplitude interferometry techniques at the cost of severely limited sensitivity. A new idea we recently…
We characterize the ability of the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to perform relative astrometry across its 500~Mpix, 3 deg^2 science field of view, and across 4 years of operation. This is done using internal comparisons of ~4x10^7…
Background. Relative astrometry at or below the micro-arcsec level with a 1m class space telescope has been repeatedly proposed as a tool for exo-planet detection and characterization, as well as for several topics at the forefront of…
Astrometry is a powerful technique in astrophysics to measure three-dimensional positions of stars and other astrophysical objects, including exoplanets and the gravitational influence they have on each other. Interferometric astrometry is…
Because of the recent technological advances, the key technologies needed for precision space optical astrometry are now in hand. The Microarcsecond Astrometry Probe (MAP) mission concept is designed to find 1 Earth mass planets at 1AU…
More than 450 exoplanets are known and this number increases nearly every day. Only a few constraints on their orbital parameters and physical characteristics can be determined, as most exoplanets are detected indirectly. Measuring the…
Atmospheric turbulence is a serious problem for ground-based interferometers. It places tight limits on both sensitivity and measurement precision. Phase referencing is a method to overcome these limitations via the use of a bright…
The idea of using stellar photometry for atmospheric monitoring for optical experiments in high-energy astrophysics is seemingly straightforward, but reaching high precision of the order of 0.01 in the determination of the vertical aerosol…
In the 1970s, the Narrabri intensity interferometer was used to measure 32 stellar diameters; some as small as 0.4 milli-arc-seconds (mas). The interferometer consisted of a pair of 6.5m telescopes with relatively crude optics, similar to…
Precision astrometry at microarcsecond accuracy has application to a wide range of astrophysical problems. This paper is a study of the science questions that can be addressed using an instrument that delivers parallaxes at about 4…
Optical imaging with microarcsecond resolution will reveal details across and outside stellar surfaces but requires kilometer-scale interferometers, challenging to realize either on the ground or in space. Intensity interferometry,…
Interferometry, as the key technique in modern precision measurements, has been used for length diagnosis in the fields of engineering metrology and astronomy. Analogous interferometric technique for time domain precision measurement is a…
We review the systematic uncertainties that have plagued attempts to obtain high precision and high accuracy from ground-based photometric measurements using CCDs. We identify two main challenges in breaking through the 1% precision…
Observations with ground-based telescopes are affected by differential atmospheric dispersion due to the wavelength-dependent index of refraction of the atmosphere. The usage of an Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector (ADC) is fundamental to…
Interferometric imaging is an emerging technique for particle tracking and mass photometry. Mass or position are estimated from weak signals, coherently scattered from nanoparticles or single molecules, and interfered with a co-propagating…
Intensity interferometry exploits a quantum optical effect in order to measure objects with extremely small angular scales. The first experiment to use this technique was the Narrabri intensity interferometer, which was successfully used in…
The differential refraction of light passing through the atmosphere can have a severe impact on image quality if no atmospheric dispersion corrector (ADC) is used. For the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) this holds true well into the…