Related papers: Global Site Selection for Astronomy

Gaia is an all sky, high precision astrometric and photometric satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) due for launch in 2010-2011. Its primary mission is to study the composition, formation and evolution of our Galaxy. Gaia will…

The nature and physical properties of asteroids, in particular those orbiting in the near-Earth space, are of scientific interest and practical importance. Exoplanet surveys can be excellent resources to detect asteroids, both already known…

The GSC-II is an all-sky database of objects derived from the uncompressed DSS that the STScI has created from the Palomar and UK Schmidt survey plates and made available to the community. Like its predecessor (GSC-I), the GSC-II was…

The Earth observation satellites (EOSs) are specially designed to collect images according to user requirements. The agile EOSs (AEOS), with stronger attitude maneuverability, greatly improve the observation capability, while increasing the…

As research becomes an ever more globalized activity, there is growing interest in national and international comparisons of standards and quality in different countries and regions. A sign for this trend is the increasing interest in…

Localizing the sky position of the gravitational wave source is a key scientific goal for gravitational wave observations. Employing the Fisher information matrix approximation, we compute the angular resolutions of LISA and TianQin, two…

We describe the application of data mining algorithms to research problems in astronomy. We posit that data mining has always been fundamental to astronomical research, since data mining is the basis of evidence-based discovery, including…

The Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) had a tremendous impact on many areas of modern astrophysics. In particular it revealed the ubiquity of infrared cirrus that are a spectacular manifestation of the interstellar medium complexity…

The DENIS survey is currently imaging the entire southern sky in the I, J, and K wavebands. The current star/galaxy separation algorithm is presented and the galaxy counts are nearly perfectly Euclidean. 95% complete and reliable galaxy…

The NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS), a critical research service for the astrophysics community, strives to provide the most accessible and inclusive environment for the discovery and exploration of the astronomical literature. Part of…

The location of an astronomical observatory is a key factor that affects its scientific productivity. The best astronomical sites are generally those found at high altitudes. Several such sites in western China and the Tibetan plateau are…

Effective space traffic management requires positive identification of artificial satellites. Current methods for extracting object identification from observed data require spatially resolved imagery which limits identification to objects…

Spatial data is playing an emerging role in new technologies such as web and mobile mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Important decisions in political, social and many other aspects of modern human life are being made using…

Access to microarcsecond astrometry is now routine in the radio, infrared, and optical domains. In particular the publication of the second data release from the Gaia mission made it possible for every astronomer to work with easily…

Position angle measurements of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) galaxies, as measured by the surface brightness profile fitting code of the SDSS photometric pipeline (Lupton 2001), are known to be strongly biased, especially in the case of…

The amount of collected data in many scientific fields is increasing, all of them requiring a common task: extract knowledge from massive, multi parametric data sets, as rapidly and efficiently possible. This is especially true in astronomy…

Many lens surveys have hitherto used observations of large samples of background sources to select the small minority which are multiply imaged by lensing galaxies along the line of sight. Recently surveys such as SLACS and OLS have…

Technical description of the new project called All Sky Automated Survey and results of the tests of our prototype instrument are presented. The ultimate goal of this project is photometric monitoring of the large area of the sky with fully…

Following the selection of The Gravitational Universe by ESA, and the successful flight of LISA Pathfinder, the LISA Consortium now proposes a 4 year mission in response to ESA's call for missions for L3. The observatory will be based on…

The high Antarctic plateau provides exceptional conditions for conducting infrared observations of the cosmos on account of the cold, dry and stable atmosphere above the ice surface. This paper describes the scientific goals behind the…