Related papers: A new sky subtraction technique for low surface br…
New and forthcoming deep-wide surveys, from instruments like the HSC, LSST and EUCLID, are poised to revolutionize our understanding of galaxy evolution, by revealing aspects of galaxies that are largely invisible in past wide-area…
Photons produced in the annihilations of dark matter particles can be detected by gamma-ray telescopes; this technique of indirect detection serves as a cornerstone of the upcoming assault on the dark matter paradigm. The main obstacle to…
Galactic all-sky maps at very disparate frequencies, like in the radio and $\gamma$-ray regime, show similar morphological structures. This mutual information reflects the imprint of the various physical components of the interstellar…
Saliency detection methods are central to several real-world applications such as robot navigation and satellite imagery. However, the performance of existing methods deteriorate under low-light conditions because training datasets mostly…
We introduce an emission-biasing scheme in the SKIRT radiative transfer code that enables efficient generation of synthetic galaxy images optimized for low-surface-brightness (LSB) science. Standard Monte Carlo radiative transfer…
Traditional photometric redshift methods use only color information about the objects in question to estimate their redshifts. This paper introduces a new method utilizing colors, luminosity, surface brightness, and radial light profile to…
We investigate the limitations of statistical absorption measurements with the SDSS optical spectroscopic surveys. We show that changes in the data reduction strategy throughout different data releases have led to a better accuracy at long…
Next generation probes of dark matter and dark energy require high precision reconstruction of faint galaxy shapes from hundreds of dithered exposures. Current practice is to stack the images. While valuable for many applications, this…
Measuring the brightness of the night sky has become an increasingly important topic in recent years, as artificial lights and their scattering by the Earths atmosphere continue spreading around the globe. Several instruments and techniques…
Astrometric surveys offer us a method to search for elusive cosmic signatures, such as ultralight dark photon dark matter and gravitational waves, by observing the deflection to the apparent positions of the stars. The detection…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) currently provides by far the largest homogeneous sample of intermediate signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) optical spectra of galaxies and quasars. The fully automated SDSS spectroscopic reduction pipeline has…
We present new calculations of the attenuation of stellar light from spiral galaxies using geometries for stars and dust which can reproduce the entire spectral energy distribution from the UV to the FIR/submm and can also account for the…
We apply the sky brightness modelling technique introduced and developed by Roy Garstang to high-resolution DMSP-OLS satellite measurements of upward artificial light flux and to GTOPO30 digital elevation data in order to predict the…
We calculate the advances in near-infrared astronomy made possible through the use of fibre Bragg gratings to selectively remove hydroxyl emission lines from the night sky spectrum. Fibre Bragg gratings should remove OH lines at high…
A new method for analyzing the returns of the custom-made 'micro'-LIDAR system, which is operated along with the two MAGIC telescopes, allows to apply atmospheric corrections in the MAGIC data analysis chain. Such corrections make it…
The analysis of optical images of galaxy-galaxy strong gravitational lensing systems can provide important information about the distribution of dark matter at small scales. However, the modeling and statistical analysis of these images is…
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…
Two iterative techniques are described for decomposing a long-slit spectrum into the individual spectra of the point sources along the slit and the spectrum of the underlying background. One technique imposes the strong constraint that the…
In hierarchical galaxy formation models, galaxies evolve through mergers and accretions. Tidally-disrupted debris from these processes can remain as diffuse, faint structures, which can provide useful insight into the assembly history of…
Improved data reduction techniques for 3D data cubes obtained from Fabry-Perot integral field spectroscopy are presented. They provide accurate sky emission subtraction and adaptive spatial binning and smoothing. They help avoiding the…