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Ground-based solar observations are severely affected by Earth's turbulent atmosphere. As a consequence, observed image quality and prevailing seeing conditions are closely related. Partial correction of image degradation is nowadays…
In astronomy and microscopy, distortions in the wavefront affect the dynamic range of a high contrast imaging system. These aberrations are either imposed by a turbulent medium such as the atmosphere, by static or thermal aberrations in the…
Long-exposure stellar images recorded with large ground-based telescopes are blurred due to the turbulent nature of the atmosphere. The VLT employs active and adaptive optics (AO) systems to compensate for the deleterious effects of the…
The next generation of Extremely Large Telescope (24 to 39m diameter) will suffer from the so-called "pupil fragmentation" problem. Due to their pupil shape complexity (segmentation, large spiders ...), some differential pistons may appear…
A semi analytic framework for simulating the effects of atmospheric seeing in Adaptive Optics systems on an 8-m telescope is developed with the intention of understanding the origin of the wind-butterfly, a characteristic two-lobed halo in…
The high-speed variability of the local water vapor content in the Earth atmosphere is a significant contributor to ground-based wavefront quality throughout the infrared domain. Unlike dry air, water vapor is highly chromatic, especially…
Spider is a balloon-borne instrument designed to map the polarization of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) with degree-scale resolution over a large fraction of the sky. Spider's main goal is to measure the amplitude of primordial…
Context. Direct imaging of exoplanets takes advantage of state-of-the-art adaptive optics (AO) systems, coronagraphy, and post-processing techniques. Coronagraphs attenuate starlight to mitigate the unfavorable flux ratio between an…
The knowledge of the Venus near-surface atmosphere is sparse. Few spacecrafts landed on the surface and measured winds with amplitudes below 1 m/s. The diurnal cycle of the wind amplitude and orientation is not known. Recent numerical…
Adaptive optics (AO) systems and image reconstruction algorithms are indispensable tools when it comes to high-precision astrometry. In this paper, we analyze the potential of combining both techniques, i.e. by applying image reconstruction…
Ground-based thermal infrared observations face substantial challenges in correcting the predominant background emitted as thermal radiation from the atmosphere and the telescope itself. With the upcoming 40\,m class ELTs, unprecedented…
During electro-optical testing of the camera for the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time, a unique low-signal pattern was found in differenced pairs of flat images used to create photon transfer curves, with…
Ground-based thermal-infrared observations have a unique scientific potential, but are also extremely challenging due to the need to accurately subtract the high thermal background. Since the established techniques of chopping and nodding…
The accuracy of ground-based astronomical photometry is limited by two factors: photon statistics and stellar scintillation arising when star light passes through Earth's atmosphere. This paper examines the theoretical role of the outer…
M subdwarfs are metal poor and cool stars. They are important probes of the old galactic populations. However, they remain elusive due to their low luminosity. Observational and modeling efforts are required to fully understand the physics…
The weak-lensing science of the LSST project drives the need to carefully model and separate the instrumental artifacts from the intrinsic lensing signal. The dominant source of the systematics for all ground based telescopes is the spatial…
Adaptive optics is a technique mostly used on large telescopes. It turns out to be challenging for smaller telescopes (0.5~2m) due to the small isoplanatic angle, small subapertures and high correction speeds needed at visible wavelengths,…
We discuss the effect of atmospheric dispersion on the performance of a mid-infrared adaptive optics assisted instrument on an extremely large telescope (ELT). Dispersion and atmospheric chromaticity is generally considered to be negligible…
We investigate the ellipticity of the point-spread function (PSF) produced by imaging an unresolved source with a telescope, subject to the effects of atmospheric turbulence. It is important to quantify these effects in order to understand…
Efforts are underway to use high-precision timing of pulsars in order to detect low-frequency gravitational waves. A limit to this technique is the timing noise generated by dispersion in the plasma along the line of sight to the pulsar,…