Related papers: Tests with a Carlina-type diluted telescope; Prima…
The ESO Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) is one of the leading interferometric facilities. It is equipped with several 8.2 and 1.8m telescopes, a large number of baselines up to 200m, and with several subsystems designed to enable…
The LISA telescopes must exhibit an optical path length stability of $\frac{\mathrm{pm}}{\sqrt{\mathrm{Hz}}}$ in the mHz observation band to meet mission requirements. The optical truss interferometer is a proposed method to aid in the…
The CarbON [CII] line in post-rEionisation and ReionisaTiOn epoch (CONCERTO) instrument is a low-resolution mapping Fourier-transform spectrometer, based on lumped-element kinetic inductance detector (LEKID) technology, operating at 130-…
I review the present status of liquid mirror telescopes. In a nutshell: LMTs do work and several have been built and used. Extensive interferometric tests of liquid mirrors (the largest one having a diameter of 2.5 meters) show diffraction…
The Balloon-borne Large-Aperture Sub-millimetre Telescope (BLAST) will operate on a Long Duration Balloon platform with large format bolometer arrays at 250, 350 and 500 microns, initially using a 2m mirror, with plans to increase to 2.5m.…
Adaptive optics (AO) offers an opportunity to stabilize an image and maximize the spatial resolution achievable by ground based telescopes by removing the distortions due to the atmosphere. Typically, the deformable mirror in an AO system…
The LAMP (Lightweight Asymmetry and Magnetism Probe) X-ray telescope is a mission concept to measure the polarization of X-ray astronomical sources at 250 eV via imaging mirrors that reflect at incidence angles near the polarization angle,…
We describe a setup based on Michelson interferometry for coherent measurements of the backscattered light from a low roughness optical surface under test. Special data processing was developed for the extraction of the useful signal from…
In the two decades since the first extra-solar planet was discovered, the detection and characterization of extra-solar planets has become one of the key endeavors in all of modern science. Recently direct detection techniques such as…
Aligning a microcantilever to an area of interest on a sample is a critical step in many scanning probe microscopy experiments, particularly those carried out on devices and rare, precious samples. We report a series of protocols that…
We describe a practical implementation of the anamorphically curved detector concept. In order to demonstrate its advantages, a telescope lab prototype was developed, built, and tested. It is based on a 4-mirror all-spherical unobscured…
X-Calibur is a balloon-borne telescope that measures the polarization of high-energy X-rays in the 15--50keV energy range. The instrument makes use of the fact that X-rays scatter preferentially perpendicular to the polarization direction.…
Balloon-borne telescopes present unique thermal design challenges which are a combination of those present for both space and ground telescopes. At altitudes of 35-40 km, convection effects are minimal and difficult to characterize.…
The Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is a future space-based interferometric gravitational-wave detector consisting of three spacecraft in a triangular configuration. The interferometric measurements of path length changes between…
The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) has two 8.4-m primary mirrors that produce beams that can be combined coherently in a "Fizeau" interferometric mode. In principle, the Fizeau PSF enables the probing of structure at a resolution up to…
In optical astronomical telescopes, the primary baffle is a tube-like structure centering in the hole of the primary mirror and the vanes usually locate inside the baffle, improving the suppression of stray light. They are the most common…
Cherenkov Telescopes are equipped with optical dishes of large diameter -- in general based on segmented mirrors -- with typical angular resolution of a few arc-minutes. To evaluate the mirror's quality specific metrological systems are…
In the summer of 2011, the first on-sky astrometric commissioning of PRIMA-Astrometry delivered a performance of 3 m'' for a 10 '' separation on bright objects, orders of magnitude away from its exoplanet requirement of 50 {\mu}'' ~ 20…
The emerging technology of large (~ 10,000 pixel) submillimeter-wave bolometer arrays presents a novel optical design problem---how can such arrays be fed by diffraction-limited telescope optics where the primary mirror is less than 100,000…
The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry (BLASTPol) is a suborbital mapping experiment designed to study the role magnetic fields play in star formation. BLASTPol has had two science flights from McMurdo…