Related papers: A Revised Characterization of the WFPC2 CTE Loss
The 3.2 gigapixel LSST camera, an array of 189 thick fully-depleted CCDs, will repeatedly image the southern sky and accomplish a wide variety of science goals. However, its trove of tens of billions of object images implies stringent…
Uncertainty in the metal abundance dependence of the Cepheid variable period- luminosity (PL) relation remains one of the outstanding sources of systematic error in the extragalactic distance scale and Hubble constant. To test for such a…
We present a new photometric calibration of the WFC3-UVIS and WFC3-IR detectors based on observations collected from 2009 to 2020 for four white dwarfs, namely GRW+70~5824, GD~153, GD~71, G191B2B, and a G-type star, P330E. These…
PLATO is designed to detect Earth-sized exoplanets around solar-type stars and to measure their radii with accuracy better than \(2\%\) via the transit method. Charge transfer inefficiency (CTI), a by-product of radiation damage to CCDs,…
The design of electron multiplying CCD cameras require a very different approach from that appropriate for slow scan CCD operation. This paper describes the main problems in using electron multiplying CCDs for high-speed, photon counting…
Photon imaging for MeV gammas has serious difficulties due to huge backgrounds and unclearness in images, which are originated from incompleteness in determining the physical parameters of Compton scattering in detection, e.g., lack of the…
With the aim of paving the road for future accurate astrometry with MICADO at the European-ELT, we performed an astrometric study using two different but complementary approaches to investigate two critical components that contribute to the…
We describe the astrometric reduction of images obtained with the FORS2/VLT camera in the framework of an astrometric planet search around 20 M/L-transition dwarfs. We present the correction of systematic errors, the achieved astrometric…
The weak-lensing science of the LSST project drives the need to carefully model and separate the instrumental artifacts from the intrinsic lensing signal. The dominant source of the systematics for all ground based telescopes is the spatial…
ESO's two FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrographs (FORS) are the primary optical imaging instruments for the VLT. They are not direct-imaging instruments, as there are several optical elements in the light path. In particular, both…
Near-infrared bandpasses on spaceborne observatories diverge from their ground-based counterparts as they are free of atmospheric telluric absorption. Available transformations between respective filter systems in the literature rely on…
We characterize the ability of the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to perform relative astrometry across its 500~Mpix, 3 deg^2 science field of view, and across 4 years of operation. This is done using internal comparisons of ~4x10^7…
The tilt, rotation, or offset of each CCD with respect to the focal plane, as well as the distortion of the focal plane itself, cause shape distortions to the observed objects, an effect typically known as field distortion (FD). We point…
The Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST) is a dedicated time-domain multi-band ($u$, $g$, $r$, $i$, and $z$) photometric survey facility under construction. In this paper, we present a preliminary study that assesses the quality of…
The current methods available to estimate gravitational shear from astronomical images of galaxies introduce systematic errors which can affect the accuracy of weak lensing cosmological constraints. We study the impact of KSB shape…
We perform a systematic analysis of the effects of photometric redshift uncertainties on weak lensing tomography. We describe the photo-z distribution with a bias and Gaussian scatter that are allowed to vary arbitrarily between intervals…
Accurately assessing image source completeness is critical for interpreting measurements on telescope data. Using the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) data from the Hubble Space Telescope ($HST$) archival…
Meeting the science goals for many current and future ground-based optical large-area sky surveys requires that the calibrated broadband photometry is stable in time and uniform over the sky to 1% precision or better. Past surveys have…
In an effort to transcend the limitations of differential imaging of exoplanets in the era of extremely large telescopes (ELTs), the first paper in this series established a rigorous, fully polarimetric framework for determining the science…
Photometric measurements allow the determination of an asteroid's absolute magnitude, which often represents the sole means to infer its size. Photometric observations can be obtained in a variety of filters that can be unique to a specific…