Related papers: Front- vs. back-illuminated CCD cameras for photom…
We explore the limits of photometric reductions of crowded stellar fields observed with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 on board the Hubble Space Telescope. Two photometric procedures, based on the DoPHOT and DAOPHOT/ALLFRAME programs…
Kepler seeks to detect sequences of transits of Earth-size exoplanets orbiting Solar-like stars. Such transit signals are on the order of 100 ppm. The high photometric precision demanded by Kepler requires detailed knowledge of how the…
The effects of photon noise, aliasing, wavefront chromaticity and scintillation on the point spread function (PSF) contrast achievable with ground based adaptive optics (AO) are evaluated for different wavefront sensing schemes. I show that…
The contrasts of features in the quiet Sun are studied using filtergrams recorded by the Broad-band Filter Imager on the Hinode/Solar Optical Telescope. In a first step, the scattered light originating in the instrument is modeled using…
We present a method for speckle holography that is optimised for crowded fields. Its two key features are an iterativ improvement of the instantaneous Point Spread Functions (PSFs) extracted from each speckle frame and the (optional)…
We present a theoretical analysis of the measuring algorithm we use when applying the Diffracto-Astrometry technique to Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) saturated stellar images. Theoretical Point Spread…
Imaging in a broad light-intensity regime with a high signal-to-noise ratio is a key capability in fields as diverse as Quantum Metrology and Astronomy. Achieving high signal-to-noise ratios in quantum imaging leads to surpassing the…
Time-of-flight (TOF) cameras are based on a new technology that delivers distance maps by the use of a modulated light source. In this paper we first describe a set of experiments that we performed with TOF cameras. We then propose a noise…
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…
Telescopes with unobstructed pupil are known to deliver clean point spread function (PSF) to their focal plane, in contrast to traditional telescopes with obstructed pupil. Recent progress in the manufacturing aspheric surfaces and mounting…
Far-field optical imaging inevitably involves low-pass spatial filtering, limiting the resolution. Moreover, conventional imaging suppresses high spatial frequency components close to the cutoff, making them invisible under noise,…
The impulsive noise in astronomical images originates from various sources. It develops as a result of thermal generation in pixels, collision of cosmic rays with image sensor or may be induced by high readout voltage in Electron…
The optics of any camera degrades the sharpness of photographs, which is a key visual quality criterion. This degradation is characterized by the point-spread function (PSF), which depends on the wavelengths of light and is variable across…
The Forward Silicon Tracker (FST) is a pivotal component of the forward upgrade of the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR), designed to discern hadron charge signs with a momentum resolution better than 30% for $0.2 < p_T < 2$ GeV/c in the…
An optimal maximum-likelihood technique for computing point-source image centroids from many, slightly offset, CCD frames is presented. The method is especially useful for measuring stellar proper motions from data taken with the Wide Field…
We characterize a near-infrared C-RED ONE camera from First Light Imaging (FLI). This camera uses a SAPHIRA electron avalanche photo-diode array (e-APD) from Leonardo (previously Selex). To do so, we developed a model of the signal…
Gated cameras flood-illuminate a scene and capture the time-gated impulse response of a scene. By employing nanosecond-scale gates, existing sensors are capable of capturing mega-pixel gated images, delivering dense depth improving on…
Optical microscopy is an essential tool in biology and medicine. Imaging thin, yet non-flat objects in a single shot (without relying on more sophisticated sectioning setups) remains challenging as the shallow depth of field that comes with…
Thick, fully depleted charge-coupled devices (CCDs) are known to exhibit non-linear behavior at high signal levels due to the dynamic behavior of charges collecting in the potential wells of pixels, called the brighter-fatter effect (BFE).…
Even though the technology of adaptive optics (AO) is rapidly maturing, calibration of the resulting images remains a major challenge. The AO point-spread function (PSF) changes quickly both in time and position on the sky. In a typical…