Related papers: Instrument and data analysis challenges for imagin…
Breakthroughs in our understanding of physical phenomena have traditionally followed improvements in instrumentation. Studies of the magnetic field of the Sun, and its influence on the solar dynamo and space weather events, have benefited…
This article begins with the discussions on the formation of speckles in the case of non-coherent quasi monochromatic source and of ways to detect them. Prior to this, a brief introduction on the behavior of the atmosphere and its effect on…
The Sunrise balloon-borne solar observatory consists of a 1m aperture Gregory telescope, a UV filter imager, an imaging vector polarimeter, an image stabilization system and further infrastructure. The first science flight of Sunrise…
The Planet Formation Imager (PFI) Project has formed a Technical Working Group (TWG) to explore possible facility architectures to meet the primary PFI science goal of imaging planet formation in situ in nearby star- forming regions. The…
Astronomical telescopes suffer from a tradeoff between field of view (FoV) and image resolution: increasing the FoV leads to an optical field that is under-sampled by the science camera. This work presents a novel computational imaging…
The main small-scale elements observed in the solar photosphere at high resolution are discussed: granules, faculaes, micropores. As a separate element of the fine structure, a continuous network of dark intergranular gaps is considered.…
The search for Earth-like exoplanets requires high-contrast and high-angular resolution instruments, which designs can be very complex: they need an adaptive optics system to compensate for the effect of the atmospheric turbulence on image…
The GraF instrument using a Fabry-Perot interferometer cross-dispersed with a grating was one of the first integral-field and long-slit spectrographs built for and used with an adaptive optics system. We describe its concept, design,…
Optical aberrations and instrument resolution can affect the observed morphological properties of features in the solar atmosphere. However, little work has been done to study the effects of spatial resolution on the dynamical processes…
Intensity interferometry removes the stringent requirements on mechanical precision and atmospheric corrections that plague all amplitude interferometry techniques at the cost of severely limited sensitivity. A new idea we recently…
As telescopes get larger, the size of a seeing-limited spectrograph for a given resolving power becomes larger also, and for ELTs the size will be so great that high resolution instruments of simple design will be infeasible. Solutions…
The currently operating space missions, as well as those that will be launched in the near future, (will) deliver high-quality data for millions of stellar objects. Since the majority of stellar astrophysical applications still (at least…
The large surveys and sensitive instruments of modern astronomy are turning ever more examples of variable objects, many of which are extending the parameter space to testing theories of stellar evolution and accretion. Future projects such…
The chromosphere is a highly complex and dynamic layer of the Sun, that serves as a conduit for mass and energy supply between two, very distinct regions of the solar atmosphere, namely, the photosphere and corona. Inferring magnetic fields…
Context: Combining high-contrast imaging with medium- or high-resolution integral field spectroscopy has the potential to boost the detection rate of exoplanets, especially at small angular separations. Furthermore, it immediately provides…
The tens of millions of radio sources to be detected with next-generation surveys pose new challenges, quite apart from the obvious ones of processing speed and data volumes. For example, existing algorithms are inadequate for source…
Adaptive optics is a technique mostly used on large telescopes. It turns out to be challenging for smaller telescopes (0.5~2m) due to the small isoplanatic angle, small subapertures and high correction speeds needed at visible wavelengths,…
Conventional ground-based optical telescopes, even those with large apertures, primarily observe stars, close binaries, and multiple systems as unresolved point sources through photometric measurements. Spectroscopy can identify multiple…
Astronomers usually need the highest angular resolution possible, but the blurring effect of diffraction imposes a fundamental limit on the image quality from any single telescope. Interferometry allows light collected at widely-separated…
The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is an "extreme" adaptive optics coronagraph system that is now on the Gemini South telescope in Chile. This instrument is composed of three different systems that historically have been separate instruments.…