Related papers: Fine tracking system for balloon-borne telescopes
Resolving fine details of astronomical objects provides critical insights into their underlying physical processes. This drives in part the desire to construct ever-larger telescopes and interferometer arrays and to observe at shorter…
Fast moving celestial objects are characterized by velocities across the celestial sphere that significantly differ from the motions of background stars. In observational images, these objects exhibit distinct shapes, contrasting with the…
We have developed a low-cost off-the-shelf component star sensor (StarSense) for use in minisatellites and CubeSats to determine the attitude of a satellite in orbit. StarSense is an imaging camera with a limiting magnitude of 6.5, which…
Observations that require large physical instrument dimensions and/or a considerable amount of cryogens, as it is the case for high spatial resolution far infrared (FIR) astronomy, currently still face technological limits for their…
Star trackers are one of the most accurate celestial sensors used for absolute attitude determination. The devices detect stars in captured images and accurately compute their projected centroids on an imaging focal plane with subpixel…
Astronomers working with faint targets will benefit greatly from improved image quality on current and planned ground-based telescopes. At present, most adaptive optic systems are targeted at the highest resolution with bright guide stars.…
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…
We propose a new method for solving an important problem of astronomy that arises in observations with ultrahigh-angular-resolution interferometers. This method is based on the application of the theory of artificial neural networks. We…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS, launched early 2018) is expected to find a multitude of new transiting planet candidates around the nearest and brightest stars. Timely high-precision follow-up observations from the ground…
The ability to analyze and forecast stratospheric weather conditions is fundamental to addressing climate change. However, our capacity to collect data in the stratosphere is limited by sparsely deployed weather balloons. We propose a…
A key challenge for starshades is formation flying. To successfully image exoplanets, the telescope boresight and starshade must be aligned to ~1 m at separations of tens of thousands of kilometers. This challenge has two parts: first, the…
The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST) is a sub-orbital experiment designed to study the process of star formation in local galaxies (including the Milky Way) and in galaxies at cosmological distances. Using a 2-m…
The observational and operational efficiency of the TIFR 1 meter balloon borne far infrared telescope has been improved by incorporating a multielement solid state optical photometer (SSOP) at the Cassegrain focus of the telescope. The SSOP…
An interferometric fluorescent microscope and a novel theoretic image reconstruction approach were developed and used to obtain super-resolution images of live biological samples and to enable dynamic real time tracking. The tracking…
The first step toward doing high-precision astrometry is the measurement of individual stars in individual images, a step that is fraught with dangers when the images are undersampled. The key to avoiding systematic positional error in…
We present a method for attaining sub-arcsecond pointing stability during sub- orbital balloon flights, as designed for in the High Altitude Lensing Observatory (HALO) concept. The pointing method presented here has the potential to perform…
Optical interferometry has been successful at achieving milliarcsecond resolution on bright stars. Imaging performance can improve greatly by increasing the number of baselines, which has motivated proposals to build large (~ 100 m) optical…
An imaging technique with sensitivity to short duration optical transients is described. The technique is based on the use of wide-field cameras operating in a drift scanning mode, whereby persistent objects produce trails on the sensor and…
We present methods and results of the testing of an inexpensive home-made diffraction limited lens system, the design of which was proposed in a recent paper and which has since been used (with slight alterations) by several research…
The Star Watch extreme-precision astrometry mission (0.1 - 1.0 uas) builds on technology developed, and validated, during the SIM (Space Interferometry Mission) project. The sole science instrument is an optical interferometer with 50-cm…