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One of the possible approaches to detecting optical counterparts of GRBs requires monitoring large parts of the sky. This idea has gained some instrumental support in recent years, such as with the "Pi of the Sky" project. The broad sky…
In recent years, intensity interferometry has seen renewed interest and successful application at Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescope arrays. These measurements are usually performed during bright moon periods while the instruments'…
Optical imperfections, misalignments, aberrations, and even dust can significantly limit sensitivity in high-contrast imaging systems such as coronagraphs. An upstream deformable mirror (DM) in the pupil can be used to correct or compensate…
Designing a photometric system to best fulfil a set of scientific goals is a complex task, demanding a compromise between conflicting requirements and subject to various constraints. A specific example is the determination of stellar…
Atmospheric aerosols can cause serious damage to human health and life expectancy. Using the radiances observed by NASA's Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR), the current MISR operational algorithm retrieves Aerosol Optical Depth…
We have developed and tested a novel method, based on LIDAR, of measuring the height and profile of the mesospheric sodium layer using a continuous wave laser. It is more efficient than classical LIDAR as the laser is on for 50% of the…
High precision astrometry provides the foundation to resolve many fundamental problems in astrophysics. The application of astrometric studies spans a wide range of fields, and has undergone enormous growth in recent years. This is as a…
Cherenkov telescope experiments, such as H.E.S.S., have been very successful in astronomical observations in the very-high-energy (VHE; E $>$ 100 GeV) regime. As an integral part of the detector, such experiments use Earth's atmosphere as a…
Asteroseismology has the capability of delivering stellar properties which would otherwise be inaccessible, such as radii, masses and thus ages of stars. When coupling this information with classical determinations of stellar parameters,…
Because of the recent technological advances, the key technologies needed for precision space optical astrometry are now in hand. The Microarcsecond Astrometry Probe (MAP) mission concept is designed to find 1 Earth mass planets at 1AU…
GAW (Gamma Air Watch) is a pathfinder experiment in the TeV range to test the feasibility of a new generation of Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACT). It combines high flux sensitivity with large field-of-view (FoV=24deg x 24deg)…
High precision astrometry aims at source position determination to a very small fraction of the diffraction image size, in high SNR regime. One of the key limitations to such goal is the optical response variation of the telescope over a…
Using kilometric arrays of air Cherenkov telescopes, intensity interferometry may increase the spatial resolution in optical astronomy by an order of magnitude, enabling images of rapidly rotating stars with structures in their…
The Chinese Small Telescope ARray (CSTAR) is the first Chinese astronomical instrument placed in Antarctica. It is a group of four identical, fully automatic $14.5\,\rm{cm}$ telescopes, with an field of view (FOV) of $20\,\rm{deg^2}$…
The method of detection of light scattering on stratospheric aerosol particles on the twilight sky background is considered. It is based on the data on sky intensity and polarization in the solar vertical at zenith distances of up to 50 deg…
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…
The Physics of the Accelerating Universe (PAU) camera is an optical narrow band and broad band imaging instrument mounted at the prime focus of the William Herschel Telescope. We describe the image calibration procedure of the PAU Survey…
The Cherenkov Telescope Array is a project that aims to exploring the highest energy region of electromagnetic spectrum. Two arrays, one for each hemisphere, will cover the full sky in a range from few tens of GeV to hundreds of TeV…
Observations of the Sun in the visible spectral range belong to standard measurements obtained by instruments both on the ground and in the space. Nowadays, both nearly continuous full-disc observations with medium resolution and dedicated…
Photometric calibration is currently the dominant source of systematic uncertainty in exploiting type Ia supernovae to determine the nature of the dark energy. We review our ongoing program to address this calibration challenge by…