Related papers: The Zwicky Transient Facility: Observing System
Over the past decade, time-domain astronomy in optical bands has developed rapidly with the operations of some wide-field survey facilities. However, most of these surveys are conducted with only a single band, and simultaneous color…
Exploration of the time variability on the sky over a broad range of flux levels and wavelengths is rapidly becoming a new frontier of astronomical research. We describe here briefly the Palomar-QUEST survey being carried out from the…
Microlensing events have historically been discovered throughout the Galactic bulge and plane by surveys designed solely for that purpose. We conduct the first multi-year search for microlensing events on the Zwicky Transient Facility…
The classification of variable objects provides insight into a wide variety of astrophysics ranging from stellar interiors to galactic nuclei. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) provides time series observations that record the variability…
We describe the SNAD Viewer, a web portal for astronomers which presents a centralized view of individual objects from the Zwicky Transient Facility's (ZTF) data releases, including data gathered from multiple publicly available…
The Bright Transient Survey (BTS) relies on visual inspection ("scanning") to select sources for accomplishing its mission of spectroscopically classifying all bright extragalactic transients found by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). We…
Commonly used wavefront sensors, the Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor and the pyramid wavefront sensor, for example, have large dynamic range or high sensitivity, trading one regime for the other. A new type of wavefront sensor is being…
A significant challenge in the study of transient astrophysical phenomena is the identification of bogus events, among which human-made satellites and debris in Earth orbit remain major contaminants. Existing pipelines effectively identify…
Modern astronomical surveys, such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), are capable of detecting thousands of transient events per year, necessitating the use of automated and scalable data analysis techniques. Recent advances in machine…
The Rapid Telescopes for Optical Response (RAPTOR) experiment is a spatially distributed system of autonomous robotic telescopes that is designed to monitor the sky for optical transients. The core of the system is composed of two telescope…
Microlensing surveys have discovered thousands of events with almost all events discovered within the Galactic bulge or toward the Magellanic clouds. The Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), while not designed to be a microlensing campaign, is…
The Simons Observatory (SO) is a cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment located in the Atacama Desert in Chile that will make precise temperature and polarization measurements over six spectral bands ranging from 27 to 285 GHz. Three…
Microlensing has a unique advantage for detecting dark objects in the Milky Way, such as free-floating planets, neutron stars, and stellar-mass black holes. Most microlensing surveys focus on the Galactic bulge, where higher stellar density…
With large-scale surveys such as the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), it has become possible to obtain a well-sampled light curve spanning the full length of the survey for any discovery within the survey footprint. Similarly, any transient…
The Simons Observatory (SO) is a cosmic microwave background (CMB) experiment from the Atacama Desert in Chile comprising three small-aperture telescopes (SATs) and one large-aperture telescope (LAT). In total, SO will field over 60,000…
The Wide-field Infrared Transient Explorer (WINTER) is a near-infrared time-domain survey instrument operating on a dedicated 1-meter robotic telescope at Palomar Observatory. The project takes advantage of recent technology advances in…
The Zernike wavefront sensor (ZWFS) stands out as one of the most sensitive optical systems for measuring the phase of an incoming wavefront, reaching photon efficiencies close to the fundamental limit. This quality, combined with the fact…
The current generation of all-sky surveys is rapidly expanding our ability to study variable and transient sources. These surveys, with a variety of sensitivities, cadences, and fields of view, probe many ranges of timescale and magnitude.…
Much of the progress made in time-domain astronomy is accomplished by relating observational multi-wavelength time series data to models derived from our understanding of physical laws. This goal is typically accomplished by dividing the…
Fast astronomical transients were observed by the VASCO Project (Villarroel et al 2020) in photographic sky surveys conducted in the 1950s. Those searches analyzed the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS-I and POSS-II) digitized plates. In…