Related papers: Fine tracking system for balloon-borne telescopes
Since 2008 we have run an observational program to accurately measure the characteristics of known exoplanet systems hosting close-in transiting giant planets, i.e. hot Jupiters. Our study is based on high-quality photometric follow-up…
Near-diffraction limited imaging and spectroscopy in the visible on large (8-10 meter) class telescopes has proved to be beyond the capabilities of current adaptive optics technologies, even when using laser guide stars. The need for high…
We propose an adaptive tracking algorithm where the object is modelled as a continuously updated bag of affine subspaces, with each subspace constructed from the object's appearance over several consecutive frames. In contrast to linear…
We report results obtained during the characterization of a commercial front-illuminated progressive scan interline transfer CCD camera. We demonstrate that the unmodified camera operates successfully in temperature and pressure conditions…
The E and B experiment (EBEX) is a balloon-borne telescope designed to measure the polarization of the cosmic microwave background with 8' resolution employing a gondola scanning with speeds of order degree per second. In January 2013, EBEX…
This paper is to introduce an online tool for the prediction of exoplanet transit light curves. Small telescopes can readily capture exoplanet transits under good weather conditions when the combination of a bright star and a large…
Capturing high resolution imagery of the Earth's surface often calls for a telescope of considerable size, even from Low Earth Orbits (LEO). A large aperture often requires large and expensive platforms. For instance, achieving a resolution…
Adaptive optics systems are critical in any application where highly resolved imaging or beam control must be performed through a dynamic medium. Such applications include astronomy and free-space optical communications, where light…
We demonstrate a path to hitherto unachievable differential photometric precisions from the ground, both in the optical and near-infrared (NIR), using custom-fabricated beam-shaping diffusers produced using specialized nanofabrication…
We have used a precision calibrated photodiode as the fundamental metrology reference in order to determine the relative throughput of the PanSTARRS telescope and the Gigapixel imager, from 400 nm to 1050 nm. Our technique uses a tunable…
Wide-field (> 100 deg$^2$) hard X-ray coded-aperture telescopes with high angular resolution (< 2') will enable a wide range of time domain astrophysics. For instance, transient sources such as gamma-ray bursts can be precisely localized…
We present a method that enables wide field ground-based telescopes to scan the sky for sub-second stellar variability. The method has operational and image processing components. The operational component is to take star trail images. Each…
The Planet Hunting and Asteroseismology Explorer Spectrophotometer, PHASES, is a concept for a space-borne instrument to obtain flux calibrated spectra and measure micro-magnitude photometric variations of nearby stars. The science drivers…
Observations that require large physical instrument dimensions and/or a considerable amount of cryogens, as it is for example the case for high spatial resolution far infrared astronomy, currently still face technological limits for their…
Background. Astrometry at or below the micro-arcsec level with an imaging telescope assumes that the uncertainty on the location of an unresolved source can be an arbitrarily small fraction of the detector pixel, given a sufficient photon…
The Next Generation Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST-TNG) is a submillimeter mapping experiment planned for a 28 day long-duration balloon (LDB) flight from McMurdo Station, Antarctica during the 2018-2019 season.…
Wide-field survey instruments are used to efficiently observe large regions of the sky. To achieve the necessary field of view, and to provide a higher signal-to-noise ratio for faint sources, many modern instruments are undersampled.…
Single particle tracking is essential in many branches of science and technology, from the measurement of biomolecular forces to the study of colloidal crystals. Standard current methods rely on algorithmic approaches: by fine-tuning…
A robust visual tracking system requires an object appearance model that is able to handle occlusion, pose, and illumination variations in the video stream. This can be difficult to accomplish when the model is trained using only a single…
We propose a novel instrument design to greatly expand the current optical and near-infrared SETI search parameter space by monitoring the entire observable sky during all observable time. This instrument is aimed to search for…