Related papers: Telescopes don't make catalogues!
Astrometric calibration of images with a small field of view is often inferior to the internal accuracy of the source detections due to the small number of accessible guide stars. One important experiment with such challenges is the Hubble…
Most scientific data will never be directly examined by scientists; rather it will be put into online databases where it will be analyzed and summarized by computer programs. Scientists increasingly see their instruments through online…
Radiometry has been of fundamental importance in astronomy from the early beginnings. In this review, we provide an overview of how to achieve a valid laboratory calibration of space telescopes and discuss ways to reliably extend this…
We present statistics on the research productivity of astronomical telescopes. These were compiled by finding papers in which new data were presented, noting which telescopes were used, and then counting the number of papers, number of…
We present a new, fully generative model for constructing astronomical catalogs from optical telescope image sets. Each pixel intensity is treated as a random variable with parameters that depend on the latent properties of stars and…
Images are at the core of most modern biological experiments and are used as a major source of quantitative information. Numerous algorithms are available to process images and make them more amenable to be measured. Yet the nature of the…
Proper interpretation and understanding of astronomical data requires good knowledge of the data acquisition process. The increase in remote observing, queue observing, and the availability of large archived data products risk insulating…
Cosmic crystallography is based on the principle that peaks in the pair separation histogram (PSH) of objects in a catalogue should be induced by the high number of topologically lensed pairs that are separated by Clifford translations, in…
The derivation of cosmological parameters from astrophysical data sets routinely involves operations counts which scale as O(N^3) where N is the number of data points. Currently planned missions, including MAP and Planck, will generate sky…
A new method for absolute polarimetric calibration of large telescopes is presented. The proposed method is highly accurate and is based on the calibration of a small sub-aperture, which is then extended to the full system by means of…
The quality of modern astronomical data, the power of modern computers and the agility of current image-processing software enable the creation of high-quality images in a purely digital form. The combination of these technological…
With growing data volumes from synoptic surveys, astronomers must become more abstracted from the discovery and introspection processes. Given the scarcity of follow-up resources, there is a particularly sharp onus on the frameworks that…
Some 400 years after Galileo, modern telescopes have enabled humanity to "see" what the natural eye cannot. Astronomical images today contain information about incredibly large objects located across vast distances and reveal information…
(Abridged) Typically large telescope construction and operation costs scale up faster than their collecting area. This slows scientific progress, making it expensive and complicated to increase telescope size. A metric that represents the…
Quantum optics potentially offers an information channel from the Universe beyond the established ones of imaging and spectroscopy. All existing cameras and all spectrometers measure aspects of the first-order spatial and/or temporal…
We review the systematic uncertainties that have plagued attempts to obtain high precision and high accuracy from ground-based photometric measurements using CCDs. We identify two main challenges in breaking through the 1% precision…
Object cross-identification in multiple observations is often complicated by the uncertainties in their astrometric calibration. Due to the lack of standard reference objects, an image with a small field of view can have significantly…
We present a new, fully generative model of optical telescope image sets, along with a variational procedure for inference. Each pixel intensity is treated as a Poisson random variable, with a rate parameter dependent on latent properties…
Astronomy produces extremely large data sets from ground-based telescopes, space missions, and simulation. The volume and complexity of these rich data sets require new approaches and advanced tools to understand the information contained…
Strong lensing is a sensitive probe of the small-scale density fluctuations in the Universe. We implement a novel approach to modeling strongly lensed systems using probabilistic cataloging, which is a transdimensional, hierarchical, and…