Related papers: Astrometry during the past 2000 years

Hipparcos Intermediate Astrometric Data (IAD) have been used to derive astrometric orbital elements for spectroscopic binaries from the newly released Ninth Catalogue of Spectroscopic Binary Orbits (SB9). Among the 1374 binaries from SB9…

Context.A new reduction of the astrometric data as produced by the Hipparcos mission has been published, claiming accuracies for nearly all stars brighter than magnitude Hp = 8 to be better, by up to a factor 4, than in the original…

Modern astrophysics is undergoing a revolution. As detector technology has advanced, and astronomers have been able to study the sky with finer temporal detail, a rich diversity of sources which vary on timescales from years down to a few…

The field of gamma-ray astronomy has experienced impressive progress over the last decade. Thanks to the advent of a new generation of imaging air Cherenkov telescopes (H.E.S.S., MAGIC, VERITAS) and thanks to the launch of the Fermi-LAT…

Reference systems and frames are crucial for high precision absolute astrometric work, and their foundations must be well-defined. The current frame, the International Celestial Reference Frame, will be discussed: its history, the use of…

The detectors designed for Gaia, the next ESA space astrometry mission to be launched in 2011, will allow to observe repeatedly stars very close to Jupiter's limb. This will open a unique opportunity to test General Relativity by performing…

Future missions like Roman, HabEx, and LUVOIR will directly image exoplanets in reflected light. While current near infrared direct imaging searches are only sensitive to young, self-luminous planets whose brightness is independent of their…

In a few years astrometry with the venerable combination of Hubble Space Telescope and Fine Guidance Sensor will be replaced by SIM, GAIA, and long-baseline interferometry. Until then we remain a resource of choice for sub-millisecond of…

The European Space Agency's Gaia space telescope, launched in 2013, aims to measure the positions, parallaxes, and proper motions of a billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. In doing so it will include hundreds of…

The Gaia Data Release 1 (GDR1) is a first, important step on the path of evolution of astrometric accuracy towards a much improved situation. Although asteroids are not present in GDR1, this intermediate release already impacts asteroid…

Distant objects in the solar system are crucial to better understand the history and evolution of its outskirts. The stellar occultation technique allows the determination of their sizes and shapes with kilometric accuracy, a detailed…

NASA's Kepler mission will fly a photometer based on a wide-field Schmidt camera with a 0.95 m aperture, staring at a single field continuously for at least 4 years. Although the mission's principal aim is to locate transiting extrasolar…

In astronomy, we are witnessing an enormous increase in the number of source detections, precision, and diversity of measurements. Additionally, multi-epoch data is becoming the norm, making time-series analyses an important aspect of…

Occultations of stars by asteroids have been observed since 1961, increasing from a very small number to now over 500 annually. We have created and regularly maintain a growing data-set of more than 5,000 observed asteroidal occultations.…

PRAIA - Package for the Reduction of Astronomical Images Automatically - is a suite of astrometric and photometric tasks designed to cope with huge amounts of heterogeneous observations with fast processing, no human intervention, minimum…

In this chapter, we briefly review the history of X-ray astronomy through its missions. We follow a temporal development, from the first instruments onboard rockets and balloons to the most recent and complex space missions. We intend to…

Advancement in astronomical observations and technical instrumentation implies taking into account the general relativistic effects due the gravitational fields encountered by the light while propagating from the star to the observer.…

The sensitivity and astrometry upgrade ASTRA of the Keck Interferometer is introduced. After a brief overview of the underlying interferometric principles, the technology and concepts of the upgrade are presented. The interferometric…

Context: Observation of star occultations is a powerful tool to determine shapes and sizes of asteroids. This is key information necessary for studying the evolution of the asteroid belt and to calibrate indirect methods of size…

Beating the Earth's day-night cycle is mandatory for long and continuous time-series photometry and had been achieved with either large ground-based networks of observatories at different geographic longitudes or when conducted from space.…