Related papers: The Science Case for PILOT I: Summary and Overview
The purpose of this thesis is to focus attention on the mechanical aspects in designing an infrared telescope, IRAIT (International Robotic Antarctic Infrared Telescope), with aperture size of 80 cm, f#=21, entirely robotic and remote…
Observing sites at the East-Antarctic plateau are considered to provide exceptional conditions for astronomy. The aim of this work is to assess its potential for detecting transiting extrasolar planets through a comparison and combination…
Atmospheric emission is a dominant source of disturbance in ground-based astronomy at mm wavelengths. The Antarctic plateau is recognized to be an ideal site for mm and sub-mm observations, and the French/Italian base of Dome C is among the…
The Polarized Instrument for Long-wavelength Observation of the Tenuous interstellar medium (PILOT) is a balloon-borne experiment aiming at measuring the polarized emission of thermal dust at a wavelength of 240 mm (1.2 THz). A first PILOT…
Dome C in Antarctica is a promising site for photometric observations thanks to the continuous night during the Antarctic winter and favorable weather conditions. We developed instruments to assess the quality of this site for photometry in…
Surveys provide a wealth of data to the astronomical community that are used well after their completion. In this paper, we propose a project that would take the maximum benefit of Dome C in Antarctica by performing two surveys, in the…
Seeing, the angular size of stellar images blurred by atmospheric turbulence, is a critical parameter used to assess the quality of astronomical sites. Median values at the best mid-latitude sites are generally in the range of…
ASTEP (Antarctica Search for Transiting ExoPlanets) is a pilot project that aims at searching and characterizing transiting exoplanets from Dome C in Antarctica and to qualify this site for photometry in the visible. Two instruments were…
We introduce PIRATE, a new remotely-operable telescope facility for use in research and education, constructed from 'off-the-shelf' hardware, operated by The Open University. We focus on the PIRATE Mark 1 operational phase where PIRATE was…
The internal antarctic plateau revealed in the last years to be a site with interesting potentialities for the astronomical applications due to the extreme dryness and low temperatures, the typical high altitude of the plateau, the weak…
The Antarctic plateau contains the best sites on earth for many forms of astronomy, but none of the existing bases was selected with astronomy as the primary motivation. In this article, we try to systematically compare the merits of…
At an altitude of 3250m and at a latitude of $75^\circ$S, the Italo-French Concordia station was open to winter-over teams in 2005. It is one of the high points of the Antarctic polar plateau. These extreme remote sites are expected to…
SOUTH POL will be a survey of the Southern sky in optical polarized light. It will use a newly designed polarimetric module at an 80cm Robotic Telescope. Telescope and polarimeter will be installed at CTIO, Chile, in late 2012. The initial…
Submillimetre/TeraHertz (e.g. 200, 350, 450 microns) astronomy is the prime technique to unveil the birth and early evolution of a broad range of astrophysical objects. A major obstacle to carry out submm observations from ground is the…
ASTEP South is the first phase of the ASTEP project that aims to determine the quality of Dome C as a site for future photometric searches for transiting exoplanets and discover extrasolar planets from the Concordia base in Antarctica.…
From the South Pole, microthermal turbulence within a narrow surface boundary layer some 200m thick provides the dominant contribution to the astronomical seeing. We present results for the seeing at a wavelength of 2.4um. The narrow…
The Large Optical/infrared Telescope (LOT) is a ground-based 12m diameter optical/infrared telescope which is proposed to be built in the western part of China in the next decade. Based on satellite remote sensing data, along with…
Wide-field rapid sky surveys serve as critical observational methods for time-domain astronomical research. The Antarctic region, with several months of continuous dark nights annually, is an ideal site for time-domain astronomical…
The Chinese Small Telescope ARray (CSTAR) is a group of four identical, fully automated, static 14.5 cm telescopes. CSTAR is located at Dome A, Antarctica and covers 20 square degree of sky around the South Celestial Pole. The installation…
These last years ground-based astronomy has been looking towards Antarctica, especially its summits and the internal continental plateau where the optical turbulence (OT) appears to be confined in a shallow layer close to the surface.…