Related papers: An advanced scattered moonlight model for Cerro Pa…
Many optical measurement techniques, such as light scattering from wavelength-scale particles or detecting motion from a surface with an optical lever, encode information in a complex radiation pattern. Extracting all available information…
We develop an inversion technique of annual scattered light curves to sketch a two-dimensional albedo map of exoplanets in face-on orbits. As a test-bed for future observations of extrasolar terrestrial planets, we apply this mapping…
We present a Monte Carlo simulation for the scattering of light in the case of an isotropic light source. The scattering phase functions are studied particularly in detail to understand how they can affect the multiple light scattering in…
This study describes both experimentally and theoretically an important hitherto undiscovered feature of the scattering of micron_sized spherical objects when illuminated with highly focused circularly polarized light. This is a regime of…
The Moon appears bright in the sky as a source of energetic neutral atoms (ENAs). These ENAs have recently been imaged over a broad energy range both from near the lunar surface, by India's Chandrayaan-1 mission (CH-1), and from a much more…
Eclipsing binaries provide one of the most direct mechanisms for measuring stellar properties such as mass and radius, but historically, determining these properties has been non-trivial and computationally prohibitive. As such, only a…
(Abr.) Laser guide stars employed at astronomical observatories provide artificial wavefront reference sources to help correct (in part) the impact of atmospheric turbulence on astrophysical observations. Following the recent commissioning…
The lunar surface is a compelling location for large, distributed optical facilities, with significant advantages over orbital facilities for high spatial resolution astrophysics. The serious development of mission concepts is timely…
Polarimetric observations of the twilight sky are effective for the investigations of scattering properties of the atmosphere at different altitudes. Modern computer technique allows to reduce the influence of multiple scattering on the…
Light echoes give us a unique perspective on the nature of supernovae and non-terminal stellar explosions. Spectroscopy of light echoes can reveal details on the kinematics of the ejecta, probe asymmetry, and reveal details on its…
For the majority of optical observing programs, the sky brightness provides the fundamental limit to signal detection such that the scientific feasibility is largely dictated by the moon phase. Since most observatories do not have the…
We characterize the near-IR sky background from 308 observations with the FIRE spectrograph at Magellan. A subset of 105 observations selected to minimize lunar and thermal effects gives a continuous, median spectrum from 0.83 to 2.5…
The optimization of the light scattered by photonic cluster made of small particles is studied with the help of the local perturbation method and special optimization algorithm. It was shown that photonic cluster can be optimized in a such…
Ground-based photometry of bright stars is expected to be limited by atmospheric scintillation, although in practice observations are often limited by other sources of systematic noise. We analyse 122 nights of bright star ($G_{mag} <…
Methods to map artificial night sky brightness and stellar visibility across large territories or their distribution over the entire sky at any site are based on the computation of the propagation of light pollution with Garstang models, a…
The intense activity of cratering on the Moon and in the inner regions of the solar system was accomplished during the first 10^9 years [1]. Occasionally, some impact events occur even nowadays. In Section 1, we treat, from a historical…
The low surface brightness (LSB) regime ($\mu_{g} \gtrsim 26$ mag arcsec$^{-2}$) comprises a vast, mostly unexplored discovery space, from dwarf galaxies to the diffuse interstellar medium. Accessing this regime requires precisely removing…
We present an algorithm capable of detecting diffuse, dim sources of any size in an astronomical image. These sources often defeat traditional methods for source finding, which expand regions around points of high intensity. Extended…
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…
This paper presents new investigations on coherent scattering in the forward direction (orders of magnitude; conservation of energy; dependence of scattered light on geometry and wavelength), and on how scattered light contamination in the…