Related papers: Analytical ray-tracing in planetary atmospheres
Atmospheric refraction affects to various degrees exoplanet transit, lunar eclipse, as well as stellar occultation observations. Exoplanet retrieval algorithms often use analytical expressions for the column abundance along a ray traversing…
The basic effect of the earth's atmospheric refraction on telescope operation is the reduction of the true zenith angle to the apparent zenith angle, associated with prismatic aberrations due to the dispersion in air. If one attempts…
Quantum fluctuations in curved space-time cause the emission of particles. In order to understand how they may be detected in a laboratory experiment, we consider a moving refractive index perturbation in an optical medium, which exhibits…
We study the impact of the atmospheric differential chromatic refraction on the measurements and precision of relative astrometry. Specifically, we address the problem of measuring the separations of close pairs of binary stars with…
Many adaptive optics systems operate by measuring the distortion of the wavefront in one wavelength range and performing the scientific observations in a second, different wavelength range. One common technique is to measure wavefront…
Observations of exoplanet transit spectra are essential to understanding the physics and chemistry of distant worlds. The effects of opacity sources and many physical processes combine to set the shape of a transit spectrum. Two such key…
In this paper, a geometrical interpretation of light diffraction is given using an infinity of fluctuating geodesics that represent paths of least time in an homogeneous space. Without using the wave theory, we provide a geometrical…
New observational facilities are becoming increasingly capable of observing reflected light from transiting and directly imaged extrasolar planets. In this study, we provide an analytic framework to interpret observed phase curves,…
In this tutorial we summarize the physics and mathematics behind refractive electromagnetic wave bending and delay. Refractive bending and delay through the Earth's atmosphere at both radio/millimetric and optical/IR wavelengths are…
We proposed an analytical model for the calculus of illumination time of the Earth for any time of year and any latitude, this model assumes the obliquity of the ecliptic as constant, the light beams as parallels, the Earth as spherical,…
Light refracted by the planet's atmosphere is usually ignored in analysis of planetary transits. Here we show that refraction can add shoulders to the transit light curve, i.e., an increase in the observed flux, mostly just before and after…
It has been posited that lunar eclipse observations may help predict the in-transit signature of Earth-like extrasolar planets. However, a comparative analysis of the two phenomena addressing in detail the transport of stellar light through…
Atmospheric regions below a refractive boundary are hidden in limb observations. Refraction thus creates a gray continuum in the planet's transmission spectrum which can hide spectral features associated with sources of atmospheric opacity.…
Meteorological data have been used to calculate refractive index fluctuations - the indicator of optical instability of the Earth's atmosphere. The calculations were made for standard pressure levels of the atmosphere in winter and summer.…
Doppler imaging spectroscopy is the most reliable way to directly measure wind speeds of planetary atmospheres of the Solar system. However, most knowledge about atmospheric dynamics has been obtained with cloud-tracking technique, which…
The recent discovery and characterization of the diversity of the atmospheres of exoplanets and brown dwarfs calls for the development of fast and accurate analytical models. We quantify the accuracy of the analytical solution derived in…
Sky imaging systems use lenses to acquire images concentrating light beams in a sensor. The light beams received by the sky imager have an elevation angle with respect to the device normal. Thus, the pixels in the image contain information…
The displacement of star images by atmospheric refraction observed by an Earth-bound telescope is dominated by a familiar term proportional to the product of the tangent of the zenith angle by the refractivity at the ground. The manuscript…
Geometrical optics provides an instructive insight into Brownian motion, ``pushed" into a large-deviations regime by imposed constraints. Here we extend geometrical optics of Brownian motion by accounting for diffusion inhomogeneity in…
Stellar occultations and transits occur when a planetary body passes in front of a star (including our Sun). For objects with an atmosphere, refraction plays an essential role to explain the drops of flux and the aureoles observed during…