Related papers: New developments in aerosol measurements using ste…
As the frontier of precision astronomical photometry continues to advance, correcting for time-variable atmospheric transmission becomes increasingly important. We describe an observational approach to monitoring optical attenuation due to…
Aerosols play a critical role in atmospheric chemistry, and affect clouds, climate, and human health. However, the spatial coverage of satellite-derived aerosol optical depth (AOD) products is limited by cloud cover, orbit patterns, polar…
Astrometry is one of the oldest branches of astronomy which measures the position, the proper motion and parallax of celestial objects. Following the Hipparcos and Gaia missions that have measured several billions of them using global…
The main goal of this work is the analysis of new approaches to the study of the properties of astronomical sites. In particular, satellite data measuring aerosols have recently been proposed as a useful technique for site characterization…
The angular size of a star is a critical factor in determining its basic properties. Direct measurement of stellar angular diameters is difficult: at interstellar distances stars are generally too small to resolve by any individual imaging…
Transforming the instrumental photometry of ground-based telescopes into a calibrated physical flux in a well-defined passband is a major challenge in astronomy. Along with the intrinsic instrumental difference between telescopes sharing…
On the basis of experience acquired at creation of the Pulkovo Spectrophotometric Catalog the method of investigation of a terrestrial atmospheric components (aerosols and water vapor) in night time are designed. For these purposes the…
The Fluorescence Detector (FD) of the Pierre Auger Observatory provides a nearly calorimetric measurement of the primary particle energy, since the fluorescence light produced is proportional to the energy dissipated by an Extensive Air…
The Phase-Referenced Imaging and Micro-arcsecond Astrometry (PRIMA) facility is scheduled for installation in the Very Large Telescope Interferometer observatory in Paranal, Chile, in the second half of 2008. Its goal is to provide…
The Pierre Auger Observatory detects the highest energy cosmic rays. Calorimetric measurements of extensive air showers induced by cosmic rays are performed with a fluorescence detector. Thus, one of the main challenges is the atmospheric…
The fluorescence-detection techniques of cosmic-ray air-shower experiments require precise knowledge of atmospheric properties to reconstruct air-shower energies. Up to now, the atmosphere in desert-like areas was assumed to be stable…
We describe an experiment, located in south-east Colorado, USA, that measured aerosol optical depth profiles using two Lidar techniques. Two independent detectors measured scattered light from a vertical UV laser beam. One detector, located…
The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is the next generation of ground-based very high energy gamma-ray instruments and is planned to be built on two sites (one in each hemisphere) in the coming years, with full array operation foreseen to…
The current generation of Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes are allowing the sky to be probed with greater sensitivity than ever before in the energy range around and above 100 GeV. To minimise the systematic errors on derived fluxes…
The science goals for ground-based large-area surveys, such as the Dark Energy Survey, Pan-STARRS, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, require calibration of broadband photometry that is stable in time and uniform over the sky to…
We present the results of a study along with a first prototype of a high precision system (? 1 arcsec) for pointing and tracking light (near-infrared) telescopes on board stratospheric balloons. Such a system is essentially composed by a…
In this paper we test the astrometric precision of VLT/FORS2 observations using a serie of CCD frames taken in Galactic bulge area. A special reduction method based on symmetrization of reference fields was used to reduce the atmospheric…
A peculiar aspect of Cherenkov telescopes is that they are designed to detect atmospheric light flashes on the time scale of nanoseconds, being almost blind to stellar sources. As a consequence, the pointing calibration of these instruments…
Traditional color and airmass corrections can typically achieve ~0.02 mag precision in photometric observing conditions. A major limiting factor is the variability in atmospheric throughput, which changes on timescales of less than a night.…
The observational and operational efficiency of the TIFR 1 meter balloon borne far infrared telescope has been improved by incorporating a multielement solid state optical photometer (SSOP) at the Cassegrain focus of the telescope. The SSOP…