Related papers: Low Wind Effect on VLT/SPHERE : impact, mitigation…
High precision cosmology with weak gravitational lensing requires a precise measure of the Point Spread Function across the imaging data where the accuracy to which high spatial frequency variation can be modelled is limited by the stellar…
ESO's two FOcal Reducer and low dispersion Spectrographs (FORS) are the primary optical imaging instruments for the VLT. They are not direct-imaging instruments, as there are several optical elements in the light path. In particular, both…
We examine the observational appearance of an optically thick, spherically symmetric, relativistic wind (a black hole wind). In a relativistic flow, the apparent optical depth becomes small in the downstream direction, while it is large in…
Analyses of Galactic late O dwarfs (O8-O9.5V) raised the `weak wind problem': spectroscopic mass loss rates ($\dot{M}$) are up to two orders of magnitude lower than the theoretical values. We investigated the stellar and wind properties of…
Astronomical telescopes suffer from a tradeoff between field of view (FoV) and image resolution: increasing the FoV leads to an optical field that is under-sampled by the science camera. This work presents a novel computational imaging…
Low wind and petaling effects, caused by the discontinuous apertures of telescopes, are poorly corrected -- if at all -- by commonly used workhorse wavefront sensors (WFSs). Wavefront petaling breaks the coherence of the point spread…
Island effect (IE) aberrations are induced by differential pistons, tips, and tilts between neighboring pupil segments on ground-based telescopes, which severely limit the observations of circumstellar environments on the recently deployed…
Most models used to predict or fit exoplanet transmission spectra do not include all the effects of atmospheric refraction. Namely, the angular size of the star with respect to the planet can limit the lowest altitude, or highest density…
We report in this paper the test of a plane holographic optical element to be used as an aberration-corrected grating for a slitless spectrograph, inserted in a convergent telescope beam. Our long term objective is the optimisation of a…
Using an observational derived model optical turbulence profile (model-OTP) we have investigated the performance of Adaptive Optics (AO) at Siding Spring Observatory (SSO), Australia. The simulations cover the performance for AO techniques…
In weak lensing investigations, galaxy shapes are deconvolved for the effects of the point spread function (PSF) using stellar images. In this paper we use physical models of the telescope optics to understand the spatial variation of the…
We present new results on the gravitational lensing shear and magnification power spectra obtained from numerical simulations of a flat cosmology with a cosmological constant. These results are of considerable interest since both the shear…
In this paper we present the first results ever obtained by applying the autoregressive (AR) technique to the precipitable water vapour (PWV). The study is performed at the Very Large Telescope. The AR technique has been recently proposed…
Atmospheric optical turbulence seriously limits the performance of high angular resolution instruments. An 8-night campaign of measurements was carried out at the LAMOST site in 2011, to characterize the optical turbulence. Two instruments…
Mass-loss rate, $\dot{M}$, is one of the key parameters affecting evolution and observational manifestations of massive stars, and their impact on the ambient medium. Despite its importance, there is a factor of ~100 discrepancy between…
The internal antarctic plateau revealed in the last years to be a site with interesting potentialities for the astronomical applications due to the extreme dryness and low temperatures, the typical high altitude of the plateau, the weak…
Atmospheric turbulence causes fluctuations in the local refractive index of air that accumulatively disturb a wave's phase and amplitude distribution as it propagates. This impairs the effective range of laser weapons as well as the…
(Abridged) Atmospheric dispersion and field differential refraction impose severe constraints on widefield MOS observations. Flux reduction and spectral distortions must be minimised by a careful planning of the observations -- which is…
An unknown absorber near the cloud top level of Venus generates a broad absorption feature from the ultraviolet (UV) to visible, peaking around 360 nm, and therefore plays a critical role in the solar energy absorption. We present a…
We present the first mid-infrared spectra of two cool white dwarfs obtained with the Spitzer Space Telescope. We also present 3.5-8 micron photometry for 19 cool white dwarfs with 5000K < Teff < 9000K. We perform a detailed model atmosphere…