Related papers: Ground-Based Submillimagnitude CCD Photometry of B…
This paper summarizes a three night observing campaign aimed at achieving milli-magnitude precision photometry of bright stars (V < 9.0) with the 1-meter Swope telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. The test targets were the main sequence…
We present the results from a three night, time-series study of the open cluster NGC 6791 using the Megacam wide-field mosaic CCD camera on the 6.5m MMT telescope. The aim of this study was to demonstrate the ability to obtain very high…
Obtaining accurate photometry of bright stars from the ground remains tricky because of the danger of overexposure of the target and/or lack of suitable nearby comparison star. The century-old method of the objective wire mesh used to…
We present a pioneering achievement in the high-precision photometric calibration of CMOS-based photometry, by application of the Gaia BP/RP (XP) spectra-based synthetic photometry (XPSP) method to the mini-SiTian array (MST) photometry.…
Ground-based exoplanet surveys such as SuperWASP, HATNet and KELT have discovered close to two hundred transiting extrasolar planets in the past several years. The strategy of these surveys is to look at a large field of view and measure…
We have carried out photometric follow-up observations of bright transiting extrasolar planets using the CbNUOJ 0.6m telescope. We have tested the possibility of obtaining high photometric precision by applying the telescope defocus…
We discuss the system requirements for obtaining millimagnitude photometric precision over a wide field using small aperture short focal length telescope systems, such as are being developed by a number of research groups to search for…
The 3.2 gigapixel LSST camera, an array of 189 thick fully-depleted CCDs, will repeatedly image the southern sky and accomplish a wide variety of science goals. However, its trove of tens of billions of object images implies stringent…
We have been doing a photometric and astrometric sample survey programme on Schmidt plates in a few selected directions in the Galaxy with an aim to study galactic stellar populations. In order to calibrate Schmidt plates photometrically,…
Although starburst galaxies have relatively flat spectral energy distributions, their strong optical emission lines and near-UV continua make it very feasible to estimate their redshifts photometrically. In this work, I describe a…
We have constructed a large format mosaic CCD camera for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The camera consists of two arrays, a photometric array which uses 30 2048 x 2048 SITe/Tektronix CCDs (24 micron pixels) with an effective imaging area of…
Time-series photometry taken from ground-based facilities is improved with the use of comparison stars due to the short timescales of atmospheric-induced variability. However, the sky is bright in the thermal infrared (3-5 um), and the…
Accurate astrometry is crucial for determining orbits of near-Earth-asteroids (NEAs) and therefore better tracking them. This paper reports on a demonstration of 10 milliarcsecond-level astrometric precision on a dozen NEAs using the Pomona…
We describe a high speed time-series CCD photometer for the prime focus of the 82-in (2.1 m) telescope at McDonald Observatory, and summarize the observational results we have obtained since it was placed into regular use in February, 2002.…
We describe a system for rapidly measuring the brightness of the night sky using a mosaic of CCD images obtained with a low-cost automated system. The portable system produces millions of independent photometric measurements covering the…
Modern scientific CMOS cameras offer very fast readout speeds and low read noise. In this study, we evaluate the performance of the Andor Marana CMOS camera through on-sky testing carried out at the NGTS facility at the ESO Paranal…
We present a technique to measure lightcurves of time-variable point sources on a spatially structured background from imaging data. The technique was developed to measure light curves of SNLS supernovae in order to infer their distances.…
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…
Since its launch in 2013, the Gaia space telescope has provided precise measurements of the positions and magnitudes of over 1 billion stars. This has enabled extensive searches for stellar and sub-stellar companions through astrometric and…
The first generation of submillimeter(submm)-wave surveys are being carried out using the 450/850-micron SCUBA camera at the JCMT on Mauna Kea. These surveys are potentially sensitive to galaxies at very high redshift, and the galaxies that…