Related papers: Radio-Optical Reference Frame Link Using the US Na…
The US Naval Observatory 8--inch astrograph has been equipped with a Kodak 1536x1024 pixel CCD since June 1995, operating in a 570--650 nm bandpass. With 3--minute exposures well exposed images are obtained in the magnitude range $R \approx…
Results of 2433 intensified CCD observations of double stars, made with the 26-inch refractor of the U.S. Naval Observatory are presented. Each observation of a system represents a combination of over 2000 short-exposure images. These…
A new international Pilot Project for the re-determination of the ICRF was initiated by the International VLBI Service for Geodesy and Astrometry (IVS) in January 2005. The purpose of this project is to compare the individual CRF solutions…
The third US Naval Observatory (USNO) CCD Astrograph Catalog, UCAC3 was released at the IAU General Assembly on 2009 August 10. It is the first all-sky release in this series and contains just over 100 million objects, about 95 million of…
We aim to investigate the overall properties of the ICRF3 with the help of the Gaia Data release 2 (Gaia DR2). This could serve as an external check of the quality of the ICRF3. The radio source positions of the ICRF3 catalog were compared…
We extend previous works by considering two additional radio frequencies (K band and X/Ka band) with the aim to study the frequency dependence of the source positions and its potential connection with the physical properties of the…
Despite their importance for astrometry and navigation, the active galactic nuclei (AGNs) that comprise the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) are relatively poorly understood, with key information such as their spectroscopic…
The U.S. Naval Observatory Robotic Astrometric Telescope (URAT) is observing the northern sky since April 2012 for an astrometric survey. Multiple overlaps per year are performed in a single bandpass (680$-$750 nm) using the "redlens" 20 cm…
We present the United States Naval Observatory (USNO) Bright-Star Astrometric Database (UBAD), a current-epoch high-accuracy astrometric catalog. The catalog consists of 364 bright northern hemisphere stars, including all but five such…
The third iteration of the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF3) is made up of 4536 quasars observed at S/X bands using Very Long baseline Interferometry (VLBI). These sources are high redshift quasars, typically between $1<z<2$,…
Using very long baseline interferometry data for the sources that comprise the third International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF3), we examine the quality of the formal source position uncertainties of ICRF3 by determining the excess…
When comparing modern fundamental reference frames in the radio (International Celestial Reference Frame) and optical (Gaia), a couple of bright radio reference sources appear to have very large radio-optical offsets, from tens up to…
The second release of Gaia data (Gaia DR2) contains the astrometric parameters for more than half a million quasars. This set defines a kinematically non-rotating reference frame in the optical domain referred to as the Gaia-CRF2. The…
It is expected that the European Space Agency mission Gaia will make possible to determine coordinates in the optical domain of more than 500000 quasars. In 2006, a radio astrometry project was launched with the overall goal to make…
The highly-accurate optical reference frame GCRF (Gaia Celestial Reference Frame) is expected to be available in several years. By the same time, a new version of radio reference frame ICRF (International Celestial Reference Frame) will be…
We present an updated K band (24 GHz) celestial reference frame (CRF) constructed from 3.5 million Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) observations collected during 211 observing epochs between May 2002 and December 2025 using the Very…
The Gaia optical reference frame is intrinsically undefined with respect to global orientation and spin, so it needs to be anchored in the radio-based International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF) to provide a referenced and quasi-inertial…
The International VLBI Service for Geodesy & Astrometry (IVS) regularly provides high-quality data to produce Earth Orientation Parameters (EOP), and for the maintenance and realization of the International Terrestrial and Celestial…
Previous studies based on the latest realisation of the International Celestial Reference Frame (ICRF3) have suggested a correlation between astrometric properties (such as the radio-optical offset) and redshift for active galactic nuclei…
The Gaia celestial reference frame (Gaia-CRF) will benefit from a close assessment with independent methods, such as Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) measurements of radio stars at bright magnitudes. However, obtaining full…