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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…
This paper is devoted to exploring how we can discover and study nearby (< 1-2 kpc) planetary and binary systems by observing their action as gravitational lenses. Lensing can extend the realm of nearby binaries and planets that can be…
The TerraServer stores aerial, satellite, and topographic images of the earth in a SQL database available via the Internet. It is the world's largest online atlas, combining five terabytes of image data from the United States Geological…
We have built and tested a compact, low-cost, but very-high-performance astronomical polarimeter based on a continuously rotating half-wave plate and a high-speed imaging detector. The polarimeter is suitable for small telescopes up to ~1 m…
DSPSR is a high-performance, open-source, object-oriented, digital signal processing software library and application suite for use in radio pulsar astronomy. Written primarily in C++, the library implements an extensive range of modular…
The advent of microcontrollers with enough CPU power and with analog and digital peripherals makes possible to design a complete particle detector with relative acquisition system around one microcontroller chip. The existence of a world…
A large single-dish submillimeter-wave telescope equipped with a focal plane array containing ~10^4 bolometers and costing about $120M could locate most protogalaxies in the southern sky within a year of operation.
Over the past few years, the role of visualization for scientific purpose has grown up enormously. Astronomy makes an extended use of visualization techniques to analyze data, and scientific visualization has became a fundamental part of…
General arguments for optimized coronagraphy in the search for planets are presented. First, off-axis telescopes provide the best telescopic platforms for use with coronagraphy, and telescope fabrication technology now allows the…
In recent times, spatial light modulators have become a common tool in optics laboratories as well as industrial environment to shape the spatial structure of a beam. Although these devices are often easy to use, they usually come at a high…
Over the next decade we will witness the development of a new infrastructure in support of data-intensive scientific research, which includes Astronomy. This new networked environment will offer both challenges and opportunities to our…
The overarching goal of planetary astronomy is to deduce how the present collection of objects found in our Solar System were formed from the original material present in the proto-solar nebula. As over two hundred exo-planetary systems are…
We show that a space-based gravitational microlensing survey for terrestrial extra-solar planets is feasible in the near future, and could provide a nearly complete picture of the properties of planetary systems in our Galaxy. We present…
As a scientific discipline, Astronomy is rather unique. We only have one laboratory, the Universe, and we cannot, of course, change the initial conditions and study the resulting effects. On top of this, acquiring Astronomical data has…
Wide binaries, particularly in large numbers and as free from selection biases as possible, constitute a largely overlooked tool for studying the Galaxy. The goal of this review is to highlight the potential inherent to large samples of…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) was revolutionary because of the extraordinary breadth and ambition of its optical imaging and spectroscopy. We argue that a 'sub-millimeter SDSS' - a sensitive large-area imaging+spectroscopic survey in…
The recent explosion of recorded digital data and its processed derivatives threatens to overwhelm researchers when analysing their experimental data or when looking up data items in archives and file systems. While current hardware…
Astronomical data does not always use Cartesian coordinates. Both all-sky observational data and simulations of rotationally symmetric systems, such as accretion and protoplanetary discs, may use spherical polar or other coordinate systems.…
Variability in the sky has been known for centuries, even millennia, but our knowledge of it is very incomplete even at the bright end. Current technology makes it possible to built small, robotic optical instruments, to record images and…
Astronomical data take on a multitude of forms -- catalogs, data cubes, images, and simulations. The availability of software for rendering high-quality three-dimensional graphics lends itself to the paradigm of exploring the incredible…