Related papers: A SiC TMA GLAO design for PLT?
Ground-based solar polarimetry has made great progress over the last decade. Nevertheless, polarimetry is still an afterthought in most telescope and instrument designs, and most polarimeters are designed based on experience and rules of…
(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…
X-ray polarimetry has seen a growing interest in recent years. Improvements in detector technology and focusing X-ray optics now enable sensitive astrophysical X-ray polarization measurements. These measurements will provide new insights…
Many objects on the sky exhibit a centrosymmetric polarization pattern, particularly in cases involving single scattering around a central source. Utilizing a novel liquid crystal device (the ``theta cell'') that transforms the coordinate…
Gamma ray bursts are often modelled as jet-like outflows directed towards the observer; the cone angle of the jet is then commonly inferred from the time at which there is a steepening in the power-law decay of the afterglow. We consider an…
The Polarized Instrument for Long-wavelength Observation of the Tenuous interstellar medium (PILOT) is a balloon-borne experiment aiming at measuring the polarized emission of thermal dust at a wavelength of 240 mm (1.2 THz). A first PILOT…
A large fraction of the dwarf satellites orbiting the Andromeda galaxy are surprisingly aligned in a thin, extended and apparently kinematically coherent planar structure. Such a structure is not easily found in simulations based on the…
The "Airships: A New Horizon for Science" study at the Keck Institute for Space Studies investigated the potential of a variety of airships currently operable or under development to serve as observatories and science instrumentation…
Building on the success of the Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope (EGRET) on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope (GLAST) will make a major step in the study of such subjects as blazars,…
The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) will be the world's first observatory for detecting gamma-rays from astrophysical phenomena and is now in its prototyping phase with construction expected to begin in 2015/16. In this work we present the…
The Space Interferometry Mission PlanetQuest Light (or SIM-Lite) is a new concept for a space borne astrometric instrument, to be located in a solar Earth-trailing orbit. SIM-Lite utilizes technology developed over the past ten years for…
A prototype of a low cost Adaptive Optics (AO) system has been developed at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia (CSIC) and tested at the 2.2m telescope of the Calar Alto observatory. We present here the status of the project, which…
Pluto's icy surface has changed colour and its atmosphere has swelled since its last closest approach to the Sun in 1989. The thin atmosphere is produced by evaporating ices, and so can also change rapidly, and in particular carbon monoxide…
We describe a practical implementation of the anamorphically curved detector concept. In order to demonstrate its advantages, a telescope lab prototype was developed, built, and tested. It is based on a 4-mirror all-spherical unobscured…
In traditional seeing-limited observations the spectrograph aperture scales with telescope aperture, driving sizes and costs to enormous proportions. We propose a new solution to the seeing-limited spectrograph problem. A massively…
The robotic 2m Liverpool Telescope, based on the Canary island of La Palma, has a diverse instrument suite and a strong track record in time domain science, with highlights including early time photometry and spectra of supernovae,…
An all-spherical catadioptic system made of glass of one type is proposed for the monitoring of large sky areas. We provide an example of such a system with the aperture of diameter 400 mm and the curved field of 30 degree in diameter.
Cornell University, the California Institute for Technology, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory are jointly studying the construction of a 25 m diameter telescope for submillimeter astronomy on a high mountain in northern Chile. This Cornell…
The existence of planes of satellite galaxies has been identified as a long-standing challenge to $\Lambda$CDM cosmology, due to the rarity of satellite systems in cosmological simulations that are as extremely flattened and as strongly…
Adaptive Optics is a prime example of how progress in observational astronomy can be driven by technological developments. At many observatories it is now considered to be part of a standard instrumentation suite, enabling ground-based…