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Technical description of the new project called All Sky Automated Survey and results of the tests of our prototype instrument are presented. The ultimate goal of this project is photometric monitoring of the large area of the sky with fully…
The concept of blind analysis, a key procedure to remove the human-based systematic error called confirmation bias, has long been an integral part of data analysis in many research areas. In cosmology, blind analysis is recently making its…
The All Sky Camera (ASC) was developed as an universal device for a monitoring of the night sky quality and night sky background measurement. ASC system consists of an astronomical CCD camera, a fish eye lens, a control computer and…
The Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field spectrograph (SAMI) Galaxy Survey is an ongoing project to obtain integral field spectroscopic observations of ~3400 galaxies by mid-2016. Including the pilot survey, a total of ~1000 galaxies have…
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has embarked on an ambitious five-year survey to explore the nature of dark energy with spectroscopy of 40 million galaxies and quasars. DESI will determine precise redshifts and employ the…
We present a method to map the artificial sky brightness across large territories in astronomical photometric bands with a resolution of approximately 1 km. This is useful to quantify the situation of night sky pollution, to recognize…
The 2.5m Isaac Newton Telescope(INT) is currently being used to carry out a major multi-colour, multi-epoch, CCD based wide field survey over an area of 100 square degrees. The survey parameters have been chosen to maximise scientific…
New multi-core imaging fibre bundles -- hexabundles -- being developed at the University of Sydney will provide simultaneous integral field spectroscopy for hundreds of celestial sources across a wide angular field. These are a natural…
Orbital detectors without pointing capability have to keep their field of view axis laying on their orbital plane, to observe the largest sky fraction. A general approach to estimate the exposure of each sky element for such detectors is a…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will observe around 10^6 spectra from targets distributed over an area of about 10,000 square degrees, using a multi-object fiber spectrograph which can simultaneously observe 640 objects in a circular…
The Probing Lensing Anomalies NETwork (PLANET) is a worldwide collaboration of astronomers using semi-dedicated European, South African, and Australian telescopes to perform continuous, rapid and precise multi-band CCD photometric…
Highly multiplexed, fiber-fed spectroscopy is enabling surveys of millions of stars and galaxies. The performance of these surveys depends on accurately positioning fibers in the focal plane to capture target light. We describe a technique…
Aiming at improving the survey efficiency of the Wide Field Survey Telescope, we have developed a basic scheduling strategy that takes into account the telescope characteristics, observing conditions, and weather conditions at the Lenghu…
Strongly lensed Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) with an observable time delay can be used to constrain the expansion history of the Universe through time-delay cosmography (TDC). As the sample of time-delay lenses grows to statistical size,…
SONG is a global ground based network of 1 meter telescopes for stellar time-domain science, an international collaboration involving many countries across the world. In order to enable a favourable duty cycle, the SONG network plans to…
New micro-satellite constellations enable unprecedented systematic monitoring applications thanks to their wide coverage and short revisit capabilities. However, the large volumes of images that they produce have uneven qualities, creating…
Autonomous navigation is one of the main enabling technologies for future space missions. While conventional spacecraft are navigated through ground stations, their employment for deep-space CubeSats yields costs comparable to those of the…
This study aims to improve the photometric calibration of astronomical photo plates. The Sonneberg Observatory's sky patrol was selected, comprising about 300,000 plates, and the digitization workflow is implemented using PyPlate. The…
We describe the target selection algorithm for the low latitude disk portion of the LAMOST Pilot Survey, which aims to test systems in preparation for the LAMOST spectroscopic survey. We use the PPMXL (Roeser et al. 2010) astrometric…
FAME is designed to perform an all-sky, astrometric survey with unprecedented accuracy. It will create a rigid astrometric catalog of 4x10^7 stars with 5 < m_V < 15. For bright stars, 5 < m_V < 9, FAME will determine positions and…