Related papers: Optical Synoptic Telescopes: New Science Frontiers

The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for…

Contemporary astronomy benefits of very large and rapidly growing amounts of data in all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, from long-wavelength radio waves to high energy gamma-rays. Astronomers normally specialize in data taken in one…

Policy Brief on "Latest Developments and Opportunities in Sky Survey", distilled from the corresponding panel that was part of the discussions during S20 Policy Webinar on Astroinformatics for Sustainable Development held on 6-7 July 2023.…

Astronomy is entering a new era as multiple, large area, digital sky surveys are in production. The resulting datasets are truly remarkable in their own right; however, a revolutionary step arises in the aggregation of complimentary…

I first review the status of Digital Sky Surveys. The focus will be on extragalactic surveys with an area of more than 100 sq.deg. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is the archetype of such imaging surveys and it is its great success that has…

The past fifty years have been an epoch of impressive progress in the field of astronomical technology. Practically all the technical tools, which we use today, have been developed during that time span. While the first half of this period…

Astrophysics and cosmology are rich with data. The advent of wide-area digital cameras on large aperture telescopes has led to ever more ambitious surveys of the sky. Data volumes of entire surveys a decade ago can now be acquired in a…

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will provide the data to support detailed investigations of the distribution of luminous and non- luminous matter in the Universe: a photometrically and astrometrically calibrated digital imaging survey…

Much of the science case for the next generation of deep, wide-field optical/infrared surveys has been driven by the further study of dark energy. This is a laudable goal (and the subject of a companion white paper by Zhan et al.). However,…

A large wide-field telescope and camera with optical throughput over 200 m^2 deg^2 -- a factor of 50 beyond what we currently have -- would enable the detection of faint moving or bursting optical objects: from Earth threatening asteroids…

Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundreds) of petabytes in the next decade. This exponential growth of new data both enables…

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be a discovery machine for the astronomy and physics communities, revealing astrophysical phenomena from the Solar System to the outer reaches of the observable Universe. While many…

Astrophotonics is a burgeoning field that lies at the interface of photonics and modern astronomical instrumentation. Here we provide a pedagogical review of basic photonic functions that enable modern instruments, and give an overview of…

The next-generation astronomy digital archives will cover most of the universe at fine resolution in many wave-lengths, from X-rays to ultraviolet, optical, and infrared. The archives will be stored at diverse geographical locations. One of…

Space-based time-domain telescopes such as CoRoT, Kepler/K2 and TESS have profoundly impacted astrophysics over the past two decades. Continuous light curves with high cadence and high photometric precision are now available for millions of…

In recent years, significant advances in computer vision have also propelled progress in remote sensing. Concurrently, the use of drones has expanded, with many organizations incorporating them into their operations. Most drones are…

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…

Radio astronomy has benefited greatly from advances in technology and will continue to do so in the future. In fact, we are experiencing a revolution in the way radio astronomy is conducted as our instruments allow us now to directly…

Over the past century, major advances in astronomy and astrophysics have been largely driven by improvements in instrumentation and data collection. With the amassing of high quality data from new telescopes, and especially with the advent…

We review some of the scientific opportunities and technical challenges posed by the exploration of the large digital sky surveys, in the context of a Virtual Observatory (VO). The VO paradigm will profoundly change the way observational…