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Observatories are complex scientific and technical institutions serving diverse users and purposes. Their telescopes, instruments, software, and human resources engage in interwoven workflows over a broad range of timescales. These…
As telescope facilities become increasingly more capable they also become increasingly complex and require additional resources to operate. This is particularly true for the current and future generations of "software defined telescopes"…
(Abridged) Typically large telescope construction and operation costs scale up faster than their collecting area. This slows scientific progress, making it expensive and complicated to increase telescope size. A metric that represents the…
The beginning of the 21st century marked the "modern era of galaxy surveys" in astronomy. Rapid innovation in observing technology, combined with the base built by galaxy catalogs and atlases dating back centuries, sparked an explosion of…
Telescope and detector developments continuously enable deeper and more detailed studies of astronomical objects. Larger collecting areas, improvement in dispersion and detector techniques, and higher sensitivities allow detection of more…
The Hubble Space Telescope's mission is summarized, with special emphasis placed on the Space Telescope Science Institute's unique experience with Hubble's behavior as an astronomical telescope in the environment of low earth orbit for over…
The power of robotic telescopes to transform science education has been voiced by multiple sources, since the 1980s. Since then, much technical progress has been made in robotic telescope provision to end users via a variety of different…
The high accuracy of modern space astrometry requires the use of General Relativity to model the propagation of stellar light through the gravitational field encountered from a source to a given observer inside the Solar System. In this…
This chapter outlines the general principles for the detection and characterisation of high-energy $\gamma$-ray photons in the energy range from MeV to GeV. Applications of these fundamental photon-matter interaction processes to the…
Adaptive Optics is a prime example of how progress in observational astronomy can be driven by technological developments. At many observatories it is now considered to be part of a standard instrumentation suite, enabling ground-based…
Most major discoveries in astronomy are unplanned, and result from surveying the Universe in a new way, rather than by testing a hypothesis or conducting an investigation with planned outcomes. For example, of the 10 greatest discoveries…
Sky surveys represent a fundamental data basis for astronomy. We use them to map in a systematic way the universe and its constituents, and to discover new types of objects or phenomena. We review the subject, with an emphasis on the…
Telescope arrays allow high-performance wide-field imaging systems to be built more quickly and at lower cost than conventional telescopes. Distributed aperture telescopes (the premier example of which is the Dragonfly Telephoto Array) are…
In the 20th century, quantum mechanics connected the particle and wave concepts of light and thereby made mechanisms accessible that had never been imagined before. Processes such as stimulated emission and quantum entanglement have…
The singular way of scheduling at major observatories has favored certain types of astronomy. This has led to the discrimination of certain types of observations which could not be accommodated. It is the goal of future operations to open…
Large-scale research infrastructures (LSRIs) are central to contemporary science policy, combining massive capital investments with international access regimes. Yet whether open access to these infrastructures translates into more…
The past fifty years have been an epoch of impressive progress in the field of astronomical technology. Practically all the technical tools, which we use today, have been developed during that time span. While the first half of this period…
The National Academy Committee on Astrobiology and Planetary Science (CAPS) made a recommendation to study a large/medium-class dedicated space telescope for planetary science, going beyond the Discovery-class dedicated planetary space…
We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of telescopers for rational functions of two variables in the continuous, discrete and q-discrete settings and characterize which operators can occur as telescopers. Using this…
We review some aspects of the current state of data-intensive astronomy, its methods, and some outstanding data analysis challenges. Astronomy is at the forefront of "big data" science, with exponentially growing data volumes and data…