Related papers: Off-disk straylight measurements for the Swedish 1…
Recently measured straylight PSFs in Hinode/SOT make granulation contrast in observed data and synthetic MHD data consistent. Data from earthbound telescopes also need accurate correction for straylight and fixed optical aberrations. We aim…
High-contrast scattered light observations have revealed the surface morphology of several dozens of protoplanetary disks at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. Inclined disks offer the opportunity to measure part of the phase function…
Stray light caused by scattering on optical surfaces and in the Earth's atmosphere degrades the spatial resolution of observations. We study the contribution of stray light to the two channels of POLIS. We test the performance of different…
All telescopes and instruments are to some degree affected by scattered light. It is possible to estimate the amount of such scattered light, and even correct for it, with a radially extended point spread function (PSF). The outer parts of…
Measuring the integrated stellar halo light around galaxies is very challenging. The surface brightness of these haloes are expected to be many magnitudes below dark sky and the central brightness of the galaxy. Here I show that in some of…
Uncertainty in the wide-angle Point Spread Function (PSF) at large angles (tens of arcseconds and beyond) is one of the dominant sources of error in a number of important quantities in observational astronomy. Examples include the stellar…
To date, nearly two hundred planet-forming disks have been imaged with high resolution. Our propensity to study bright and extended objects is however biasing our view of the disk demography. In this work, we contribute to alleviate this…
The contrasts of features in the quiet Sun are studied using filtergrams recorded by the Broad-band Filter Imager on the Hinode/Solar Optical Telescope. In a first step, the scattered light originating in the instrument is modeled using…
The Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope (SST) offers excellent imaging quality, but it has a comparatively small field of view. This means that while observing the solar photosphere, there has been no convenient way of calibrating the image scale…
A robust and extended characterization of the point spread function (PSF) is crucial to extract the photometric information produced by deep imaging surveys. Here, we present the extended PSFs of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), one of…
We present the first results from the HST Archival Legacy project "SKYSURF." As described in Windhorst et al. 2022, SKYSURF utilizes the large HST archive to study the diffuse UV, optical, and near-IR backgrounds and foregrounds in detail.…
We demonstrate that for data recorded with a solar telescope that uses adaptive optics and/or post-processing to compensate for many low- and high-order aberrations, the RMS granulation contrast is directly proportional to the Strehl ratio…
Stray light significantly influences the detection capabilities of astronomical telescopes. The actual stray-light level during observations depends not only on the telescope's inherent stray-light suppression capability but also on its…
Spatially-resolved images of debris disks are necessary to determine disk morphological properties and the scattering phase function (SPF) which quantifies the brightness of scattered light as a function of phase angle. Current…
We review recent progress in high-resolution imaging of scattered light from disks around young stellar objects. Many new disks have been discovered or imaged in scattered light, and improved instrumentation and observing techniques have…
The diffuse, unresolved sky provides most of the photons that the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) receives, yet remains poorly understood. HST Archival Legacy program SKYSURF aims to measure the 0.2-1.6 $\mu$m sky surface brightness (sky-SB)…
We investigate high resolution imaging polarimetry of HD 169142 taken in the R' and I' bands with the SPHERE/ZIMPOL instrument for an accurate quantitative measurement of the radiation scattered by the circumstellar disk. We observe a…
A point spread function (PSF) describes the distribution of light for a pure point source in an astronomical image due to the optics of the instrument. An accurate PSF is key for deconvolution, point source photometry and source removal.…
The ultimate goal of the "Pi of the Sky" apparatus is observation of optical flashes of astronomical origin and other light sources variable on short timescales. We search mainly for optical emission of Gamma Ray Bursts, but also for…
With the arrival of the next generation of ultra-deep optical imaging surveys reaching $\mu_V$$\sim$30 mag/arcsec$^2$ (3$\sigma$; 10"$\times$10"), the removal of scattered light due to the point spread function (PSF) effect remains a…