Related papers: The StarScan plate measuring machine: overview and…
The second USNO CCD Astrograph Catalog, UCAC2 was released in July 2003. Positions and proper motions for 48,330,571 sources (mostly stars) are available on 3 CDs, supplemented with 2MASS photometry for 99.5% of the sources. The catalog…
The Chinese Plate-Digitizing Project has digitized a total number of about 30,000 astronomical plates from 11 telescopes of five observatories (SHAO, NAOC, PMO, YNAO, and QDO) in China, spanning nearly 100 years of observations. In this…
We demonstrate the feasibility of determining magnitudes of stars on archival photographic plates using a commercially available scanner. We describe one photometric approach that could serve as a useful example for other studies. In…
The third US Naval Observatory (USNO) CCD Astrograph Catalog, UCAC3 was released at the IAU General Assembly on 2009 August 10. It is a highly accurate, all-sky astrometric catalog of about 100 million stars in the R = 8 to 16 magnitude…
We want to study whether the astrometric and photometric accuracies obtained for the Carte du Ciel plates digitized with a commercial digital camera are high enough for scientific exploitation of the plates. We use a digital camera Canon…
Photographic plate archives contain a wealth of information about positions and brightness celestial objects had decades ago. Plate digitization is necessary to make this information accessible, but extracting it is a technical challenge.…
The third US Naval Observatory (USNO) CCD Astrograph Catalog, UCAC3 was released at the IAU General Assembly on 2009 August 10. It is the first all-sky release in this series and contains just over 100 million objects, about 95 million of…
We have been doing a sample survey in UBV photometry and proper motions as part of an investigation of galactic structure and evolution. The programme is based on Schmidt plates (from OCA, Tautenburg, Palomar and ESO Schmidt telescopes)…
The US Naval Observatory 8--inch astrograph has been equipped with a Kodak 1536x1024 pixel CCD since June 1995, operating in a 570--650 nm bandpass. With 3--minute exposures well exposed images are obtained in the magnitude range $R \approx…
From the mid-19th century to the end of the 20th century, photographic plates served as the primary detectors for astronomical observations. Astronomical photographic observations in China began in 1901, and over a century, a total of…
The fourth United States Naval Observatory (USNO) CCD Astrograph Catalog, UCAC4 was released in August 2012 (double-sided DVD and CDS data center Vizier catalog I/322). It is the final release in this series and contains over 113 million…
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,…
A machine capable of digitizing two 8 inch by 10 inch (203 mm by 254 mm) glass astrophotographic plates or a single 14 inch by 17 inch (356 mm by 432 mm) plate at a resolution of 11 microns per pixel or 2309 dots per inch (dpi) in 92…
Using the adaptive optics facilities at the 200-in Hale and 10-m Keck II, we observed in the near infrared a sample of 12 binary and multiple stars and one open cluster. We used the near diffraction limited images of these systems to…
Astrocombs are ideal spectrograph calibrators whose limiting precision can be derived using a second, independent, astrocomb system. We therefore analyse data from two astrocombs (one 18 GHz and one 25 GHz) used simultaneously on the HARPS…
We describe the process implemented in the DASCH pipeline which applies a reliable astrometric correction to each scanned plate. Our first blind astrometric fit resolves the pointing, scale and orientation of the plate in the sky using…
We have been doing a photometric and astrometric sample survey programme on Schmidt plates in a few selected directions in the Galaxy with an aim to study galactic stellar populations. In order to calibrate Schmidt plates photometrically,…
USNO-B is an all-sky catalog that presents positions, proper motions, magnitudes in various optical passbands, and star/galaxy estimators for 1,042,618,261 objects derived from 3,643,201,733 separate observations. The data were obtained…
As one of the most widely recognized high-quality standard stars, the Stetson standards have been extensively used as a photometric reference for calibrating other surveys. In this work, we present an independent validation and…
New astrometric reductions of the US Naval Observatory CCD Astrograph Catalog (UCAC) all-sky observations were performed from first principles using the TGAS stars in the 8 to 11 magnitude range as reference star catalog. Significant…