Related papers: Telescopes don't make catalogues!
Cataloging is challenging in crowded fields because sources are extremely covariant with their neighbors and blending makes even the number of sources ambiguous. We present the first optical probabilistic catalog, cataloging a crowded (~0.1…
Building on previous Bayesian approaches, we introduce a novel formulation of probabilistic cross-identification, where detections are directly associated to (hypothesized) astronomical objects in a globally optimal way. We show that this…
Data analysis methods have always been of critical importance for quantitative sciences. In astronomy, the increasing scale of current and future surveys is driving a trend towards a separation of the processes of low-level data reduction…
Astronomical observations, physical experiments as well as computer simulations often involve discrete data sets supposed to represent a fair sample of an underlying smooth and continuous field. Reconstructing the underlying fields from a…
I explain the difficulty of making various concepts of and relating to probability precise, rigorous and physically significant when attempting to apply them in reasoning about objects (e.g., spacetimes) living in infinite-dimensional…
Crossmatching catalogs at different wavelengths is a difficult problem in astronomy, especially when the objects are not point-like. At radio wavelengths an object can have several components corresponding, for example, to a core and lobes.…
The estimation of the number of point-sources in the sky is one the oldest problems in astronomy, yet an easy and efficient method for estimating the uncertainty on these counts is still an open problem. Probabilistic cataloging solves the…
Most popular strategies to capture subjective judgments from humans involve the construction of a unidimensional relative measurement scale, representing order preferences or judgments about a set of objects or conditions. This information…
We present the design of a novel way of handling astronomical catalogs in Astro-WISE in order to achieve the scalability required for the data produced by large scale surveys. A high level of automation and abstraction is achieved in order…
Large catalogues are ubiquitous throughout astronomy, but most scientific analyses are carried out on smaller samples selected from these catalogues by chosen cuts on catalogued quantities. The selection function of that scientific sample -…
Heisenberg's uncertainty principle tells us that it is impossible to determine simultaneously the position of a photon crossing a telescope's aperture and its momentum. Super-resolution imaging techniques rely on modification of the…
The statistical power of weak lensing measurements is principally driven by the number of high redshift galaxies whose shapes are resolved. Conventional wisdom and physical intuition suggest this is optimised by deep imaging at long (red or…
Photometric redshifts play an important role as a measure of distance for various cosmological topics. Spectroscopic redshifts are only available for a very limited number of objects but can be used for creating statistical models. A broad…
The astronomy community usually turns to the Astrophysics Data System for bibliometrics. When the context is cross-disciplinary, commercial products like Web of Science and Scopus are used along with related analytics tools instead. The…
Clustering objects into synthetic groups is a natural activity of any science. Astrophysics is not an exception and is now facing a deluge of data. For galaxies, the one-century old Hubble classification and the Hubble tuning fork are still…
The answers to fundamental science questions in astrophysics, ranging from the history of the expansion of the universe to the sizes of nearby stars, hinge on our ability to make precise measurements of diverse astronomical objects. As our…
The objective of neutrino astronomy, born with the identification of thermonuclear fusion in the sun and the particle processes controlling the fate of a nearby supernova, is to build instruments which reach throughout and far beyond our…
Fundamental changes are taking place in the way we do astronomy. In twenty years time, it is likely that most astronomers will never go near a cutting-edge telescope, which will be much more efficiently operated in service mode. They will…
Lucky imaging is a technique for high resolution astronomical imaging at visible wavelengths, utilising medium sized ground based telescopes in the 2--4m class. The technique uses high speed, low noise cameras to record short exposures…
When we perform probabilistic inferences with the Gaia Mission data, we technically require a likelihood function, or a probability of the (raw-ish) data as a function of stellar (astrometric and photometric) properties. Unfortunately, we…