Related papers: The astrometric recognition of the solar Clementin…
Precise starlight positions near the sun were measured during the 21 August 2017 total solar eclipse in order to measure their gravitational deflections. The equipment, procedures, and analysis are described in detail. A portable refractor,…
Earth's analemma is the lopsided figure eight marked out over a year by the position of the Sun in the sky observed at the same clock time each day. It shows how solar time deviates from clock time. The analemma's shape results from the…
Sundials and gnomons pointing out dates and times are a beautiful reminder of how we understand the movement of the Sun and use it to structure day and year. They also encapsulate the basic astronomical knowledge and concepts of the…
Saturn's geometric magnitude and albedo were determined by Mallama et al. (2017, Icarus 282, 19-33). That analysis depended largely on photometric data obtained when the ring system interfered with observations of the globe. In this study…
Starting in December 2014, Kepler K2 observed Neptune continuously for 49 days at a 1-minute cadence. The goals consisted of studying its atmospheric dynamics (Simon et al. 2016), detecting its global acoustic oscillations (Rowe et al.,…
The 11-year solar cycle is the dominant pattern of solar activity reflecting the oscillatory dynamo mechanism in the Sun. Solar cycles were directly observed since 1700, while indirect proxies suggest their existence over a much longer…
We use recently digitized sunspot drawings from Mount Wilson Observatory to investigate the latitudinal dependence of tilt angles of active regions and its change with solar cycle. The drawings cover the period from 1917 to present and…
A bright prominence associated with a coronal mass ejection (CME) was seen erupting from the Sun on 9 April 2008. This prominence was tracked by both the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) EUVI and COR1 telescopes, and was…
Here we explore a novel approach in order to try to measure the post-Newtonian 1/c^2 Lense-Thirring secular effect induced by the gravitomagnetic field of the Sun on the planetary orbital motion. Due to the relative smallness of the solar…
The GLIMPSE (Galactic Legacy Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire) Point Source Catalog of ~ 30 million mid-infrared sources towards the inner Galaxy, 10 < |l| < 65 degrees and |b| < 1 degree, was used to determine the distribution of stars in…
The light distribution in the inner few kiloparsecs of the Milky Way is recovered non-parametrically from a dust-corrected near-infrared COBE/DIRBE surface brightness map of the inner Galaxy. The best fits to the photometry are obtained…
We have studied a sample of Galactic classical Cepheids with their distance estimates taken from Skowron et al. (2019), where they were determined based on the period-luminosity relation. In this paper the Skowron et al. (2019) distances…
Analytical and numerical calculations show that a putative temporal variation of the speed of light c, with the meaning of space-time structure constant c_ST, assumed to be linear over timescales of about one century, would induce a secular…
Adaptive optics (AO) systems deliver high-resolution images that may be ideal for precisely measuring positions of stars (i.e. astrometry) if the system has stable and well-calibrated geometric optical distortions. A calibration unit,…
The orbital displacement of the Moon is known to a precision on the order of centimeters from the lunar laser ranging data, while the lunar profile's confidence level is still only about 200 m. The lunar motion is used to measure the solar…
Geometric distortion (GD) critically constrains the precision of astrometry. Using well-established methods to correct GD requires calibration observations, which can only be obtained using a special dithering strategy during the…
Near the end of the 16th century Wilhelm IV, Landgraf von Hessen-Kassel, set up an observatory with the main goal to increase the accuracy of stellar positions primarily for use in astrology and for calendar purposes. A new star catalogue…
Astrometric monitoring of stars provides a promising method for discovery of low-mass planets around nearby Sun-like stars. The astronomical community has proposed several telescopes designed to perform high-precision astrometric…
Using the adaptive optics facilities at the 200-in Hale and 10-m Keck II, we observed in the near infrared a sample of 12 binary and multiple stars and one open cluster. We used the near diffraction limited images of these systems to…
Some active stars show a so-called flip-flop phenomenon in which the main spot activity periodically switches between two active longitudes that are 180 degrees apart. In this paper we study the flip-flop phenomenon by converting results…