Related papers: A Revised Characterization of the WFPC2 CTE Loss

Transforming the instrumental photometry of ground-based telescopes into a calibrated physical flux in a well-defined passband is a major challenge in astronomy. Along with the intrinsic instrumental difference between telescopes sharing…

As a legacy of the Hubble Space Telescope, a multi-cycle public survey has recently been approved and began to scan an area of approximately 0.5 degrees x 1.5 degrees in one quadrant of M31, using two cameras and several filters. The…

The Main Sequence Luminosity Function (LF) of the Galactic globular cluster NGC 288 has been obtained using deep WFPC2 photometry. We have employed a new method to correct for completeness and fully account for bin-to-bin migration due to…

We characterize the variation in photometric response of the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) across its 520~Mpix science array during 4 years of operation. These variations are measured using high signal-to-noise aperture photometry of $>10^7$…

We present a striking new Hubble Space Telescope (HST) observation of the rich cluster Abell 2218 taken with the Wide-Field and Planetary Camera (WFPC2). HST's restored image quality reveals a sizeable number of gravitationally-lensed…

For about three years, it was known that precision spectrophotometry with FORS2 suffered from systematic errors that made quantitative observations of planetary transits impossible. We identified the Longitudinal Atmospheric Dispersion…

Strong gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters is a fundamental tool to study dark matter and constrain the geometry of the Universe. Recently, the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields programme has allowed a significant improvement of…

Newly acquired data and improved data reduction algorithms mandate a fresh look at the absolute flux calibration of the CCD cameras on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The goals are to achieve a 1\%…

We present the final legacy version of stellar photometry for the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) survey. We have reprocessed all of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys…

Stability and photometric accuracy of silicon imaging detectors are essential for the Habitable Worlds Observatory and a range of NASA missions that will explore time domain astrophysics and astronomy over a spectral range spanning soft…

Astronomers working with faint targets will benefit greatly from improved image quality on current and planned ground-based telescopes. At present, most adaptive optic systems are targeted at the highest resolution with bright guide stars.…

The original Kepler mission achieved high photometric precision thanks to ultra-stable pointing enabled by use of four reaction wheels. The loss of two of these reaction wheels reduced the telescope's ability to point precisely for extended…

Post-deposition CdCl$_2$ treatment of polycrystalline CdTe is known to increase photovoltaic efficiency. However, the precise chemical, structural, and electronic changes that underpin this improvement are still debated. In this study,…

We identify a systematic distortion of the gain-vs.-frequency function of radio telescopes caused by digital flattening ("whitening") of the signal's spectrum followed by re-quantization, a common pair of processes in the signal processing…

In this paper we test the astrometric precision of VLT/FORS2 observations using a serie of CCD frames taken in Galactic bulge area. A special reduction method based on symmetrization of reference fields was used to reduce the atmospheric…

We describe our application of broad-band photometric redshift techniques to faint galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field. To magnitudes AB(8140) < 26, the accuracy of the photometric redshifts is a few tenths and the reliability of the…

One of the most exciting and pressing issues in cosmology today is the discrepancy between some measurements of the local Hubble constant and other values of the expansion rate inferred from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation.…

We have discovered an anomalous behavior of CCD readout electronics that affects their use in many astronomical applications. An offset in the digitization of the CCD output voltage that depends on the binary encoding of one pixel is added…

High-precision time series photometry with the Kepler satellite has been crucial to our understanding both of exoplanets, and via asteroseismology, of stellar physics. After the failure of two reaction wheels, the Kepler satellite has been…

In this report, we examine the behavior of Charge Transfer Efficiency (CTE) on the WFC3/UVIS detector over time as computed by the Extended Pixel Edge Response (EPER) technique, using internal calibration data acquired from 2009 through…