Related papers: The Palomar Transient Factory: System Overview, Pe…
Blind discoveries of millimeter-wave (mm-wave) transient events in non-targeted surveys, as opposed to follow-up or pointed observations, have only become possible in the past decade using cosmic microwave background surveys. Here we…
Precision measurements of the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect in clusters of galaxies require excellent rejection of common-mode signals and wide frequency coverage. We describe an imaging, efficient, differential Fourier transform spectrometer…
Running Median Subtraction Filter (RMSF) is a robust statistical tool for removing slowly varying baselines in data streams containing transients (short-duration signals) of interest. In this work, we explore the RMSF performance and…
The Las Cumbres Observatory operates a fleet of robotically controlled telescopes currently two 2m, nine 1m, and ten 0.4m telescopes, distributed amongst six sites covering both hemispheres. Telescopes of an aperture class are equipped with…
Modern time-domain surveys continuously monitor large swaths of the sky to look for astronomical variability. Astrophysical discovery in such data sets is complicated by the fact that detections of real transient and variable sources are…
Although several existing and upcoming telescopes have imaging as their primary mode, they also have a sensitive phased-array mode with a multiple-beam forming capability enabling high time resolution studies of several types of objects,…
We describe a Phased Array Feed (PAF) system, called Apertif, which will be installed in the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT). The aim of Apertif is, at frequencies from 1.0 to 1.7 GHz, to increase the instantaneous field of view…
We propose MFT -- Multi-Flow dense Tracker -- a novel method for dense, pixel-level, long-term tracking. The approach exploits optical flows estimated not only between consecutive frames, but also for pairs of frames at logarithmically…
We present overall specifications and science goals for a new optical and near-infrared (350 - 1650 nm) instrument designed to greatly enlarge the current Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) phase space. The Pulsed All-sky…
The Automated Planet Finder (APF) is a facility purpose-built for the discovery and characterization of extrasolar planets through high-cadence Doppler velocimetry of the reflex barycentric accelerations of their host stars. Located atop…
The International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) is a 4-meter survey telescope continuously observing towards the zenith in the SDSS g', r', and i' bands. This survey telescope is designed to detect various astrophysical transients (for…
We describe the difference imaging pipeline (DiffImg) used to detect transients in deep images from the Dark Energy Survey Supernova program (DES-SN) in its first observing season from Aug 2013 through Feb 2014. DES-SN is a search for…
We describe here a new full 2-D parameterization of the PSFs of the three XMM-Newton EPIC telescopes as a function of instrument, energy, off-axis angle and azimuthal angle, covering the whole field-of-view of the three EPIC detectors. It…
Diffractive/refractive optics, such as Phase Fresnel Lenses (PFL's), offer the potential to achieve excellent imaging performance in the x-ray and gamma-ray photon regimes. In principle, the angular resolution obtained with these devices…
High throughput optical system is defined to possess the features of both large field of view (FOV) and high resolution. However, it is full of challenge to design such a telescope with the two conflicting specifications at the same time.…
With their wide fields of view and often relatively long coverage of any position in the sky in imaging survey mode, modern radio telescopes provide a data stream that is naturally suited to searching for rare transients. However, Radio…
Transient imaging or light-in-flight techniques capture the propagation of an ultra-short pulse of light through a scene, which in effect captures the optical impulse response of the scene. Recently, it has been shown that we can capture…
The International Liquid Mirror Telescope (ILMT) is a 4-m aperture, zenith-pointing telescope with a field-of-view of 22', situated in the foothills of the Himalayas. The telescope operates in continuous survey mode, making it a useful…
Continuous wavefront sensing on future space telescopes allows relaxation of stability requirements while still allowing on-orbit diffraction-limited optical performance. We consider the suitability of phase retrieval to continuously…
(abridged) In the hunt for rare time-domain events, confusing exotic extragalactic phenomena with more common Galactic foreground events is an important consideration. We show how observations from multiple wavebands, in this case optical…