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Aims. As a new approach to the study of resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies, our goal is to demonstrate in NGC300 that integral field spectroscopy with high spatial resolution and excellent seeing conditions reaches an…
The Starlink satellites are shaped like flat panels. The flat sides face zenith and nadir during normal operations. Their brightness is determined by the product of the solar illumination on the downward facing side of the panel multiplied…
The Faint Sky Variability Survey is aimed at finding variable objects in the brightness range between 17th and 25th magnitude on timescales between tens of minutes and years with photometric precisions ranging from 3 millimagnitudes for the…
A key requirement for autonomous on-orbit proximity operations is the estimation of a target spacecraft's relative pose (position and orientation). It is desirable to employ monocular cameras for this problem due to their low cost, weight,…
This paper develops a general observing strategy for missions performing all-sky surveys, where a single spacecraft maps the celestial sphere subject to realistic constraints. The strategy is flexible such that targeted observations and…
We present a method for creating simulated galaxy catalogs with realistic galaxy luminosities, broad-band colors, and projected clustering over large cosmic volumes. The technique, denoted ADDGALS (Adding Density Dependent GAlaxies to…
Strong gravitational lensing is a powerful tool for investigating dark matter and dark energy properties. With the advent of large-scale sky surveys, we can discover strong lensing systems on an unprecedented scale, which requires efficient…
Flat-field reflects the non-uniformity of the photometric response at the focal plane of an instrument, which uses digital image sensors, such as Charge Coupled Device (CCD) and Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS). This…
We present a data-driven technique to analyze multifrequency images from upcoming cosmological surveys mapping large sky area. Using full information from the data at the two-point level, our method can simultaneously constrain the…
Galaxy clusters are usually detected in blind optical surveys via suitable filtering methods. We present an optimal matched filter which maximizes their signal-to-noise ratio by taking advantage of the knowledge we have of their intrinsic…
Orbiting space objects have become in the last decade a major nuisance impacting ground astronomy and orbiting space assets, from observatories to satellites and space stations. In particular with the rise of the satellite population in Low…
We summarize methods and plans to monitor and calibrate photometric observations with our autonomous, robotic network of 2m, 1m and 40cm telescopes. These are sited globally to optimize our ability to observe time-variable sources. Wide…
We describe a process for cross-calibrating the effective areas of X-ray telescopes that observe common targets. The targets are not assumed to be "standard candles" in the classic sense, in that we assume that the source fluxes have…
The Sydney University Stellar Interferometer (SUSI) has two beam combiners, i.e. the Precision Astronomical Visible Observations (PAVO) and the Microarcsecond University of Sydney Companion Astrometry (MUSCA). The primary beam combiner,…
Perceiving the three-dimensional (3D) structure of the spacecraft is a prerequisite for successfully executing many on-orbit space missions, and it can provide critical input for many downstream vision algorithms. In this paper, we propose…
Stacking analysis is a means of detecting faint sources using a priori position information to estimate an aggregate signal from individually undetected objects. Confusion severely limits the effectiveness of stacking in deep surveys with…
Hot big bang cosmology says nothing about the topology of the Universe. A topology-independent algorithm is presented which is complementary to that of Lehoucq et al. 1996 and which searches for evidence of multi-connectedness using…
This paper describes the Wide Field Spectrograph (WiFeS) under construction at the Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics (RSAA) of the Australian National University (ANU) for the ANU 2.3m telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory.…
Weak lensing convergence can be used directly to map and probe the dark mass distribution in the universe. Building on earlier studies, we recall how the statistics of the convergence field are related to the statistics of the underlying…
We explore the kinematic scaling relations of 38 dwarf galaxies in the Fornax Cluster using observations from the SAMI integral field spectrograph. We focus on the Fundamental Plane (FP), defined by the physical properties of the objects…