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I argue that there is a crisis in optical Astronomy due to a paucity of telescopes and thus the need for a paradigm shift in telescope technology. Large increases in collecting areas and observing time/astronomer are only possible if we…
Strong gravitational lensing enables a wide range of science: probing cosmography; testing dark matter models; understanding galaxy evolution; and magnifying the faint, small and distant Universe. However to date exploiting strong lensing…
Weak lensing observations have the potential to be even more powerful than cosmic microwave background (CMB) observations in constraining cosmological parameters. However, the practical limits to weak lensing observations are not known.…
Recent weak lensing observations have pushed the use of 4 meter-class telescopes to the limits of their capabilities with exposure times exceeding several hours. The leading idea is that the surface density of faint galaxies up to very…
We consider cosmological applications of galaxy number density correlations to be inferred from future deep and wide multi-band optical surveys. We mostly focus on very large scales as a probe of possible features in the primordial power…
Weak gravitational lensing surveys measure the distortion of the image of distant sources due to the deflections of light rays by the fluctuations of the gravitational potential along the line of sight. Since they probe the non-linear…
The next-generation radio astronomy instruments are providing a massive increase in sensitivity and coverage, through increased stations in the array and frequency span. Two primary problems encountered when processing the resultant…
Intensity mapping has emerged as a promising tool to probe the three-dimensional structure of the universe. The traditional approach of galaxy redshift surveys is based on individual galaxy detection, typically performed by thresholding and…
Context. The Large Array Survey Telescope (LAST) is a wide-field visual-band survey designed to explore the variable and transient sky with high cadence. Its raw data stream is automatically processed in near real time at the observatory…
We study the constraints which the next generation of radio telescopes could place on the nature of dark energy, dark matter and inflation by studying the gravitational lensing of high redshift 21 cm emission, and we compare with the…
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…
Weak lensing surveys have become a powerful tool for mapping mass distributions and constraining the expansion history of our Universe, but continuum surveys must average over a large number of galaxies to average down the ellipticity noise…
Strong lensing gravitational time delays are a powerful and cost effective probe of dark energy. Recent studies have shown that a single lens can provide a distance measurement with 6-7 % accuracy (including random and systematic…
The exploration of the time-variable astronomical sky at submm wavelengths is rapidly becoming more feasible with large sky surveys by Cosmic Microwave Background telescopes with tens of thousands of detectors. Observations with the Atacama…
The amount of scientific data to be transmitted from deep-space probes is very limited due to RF-communications constraints. Free-space optical communication can alleviate this bottleneck, increasing data rate while reducing weight, mass…
Gravitational lensing causes the distribution of observed brightnesses of standard candles at a given redshift to be highly non-gaussian. The distribution is strongly, and asymmetrically, peaked at a value less than the expected value in a…
Weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies by foreground structures has proven to be a powerful tool to study the mass distribution in the universe. The advent of panoramic cameras on 4m class telescope has led to a first generation of…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be the largest time-domain photometric survey ever. In order to maximize the LSST science yield for a broad array of transient stellar phenomena, it is necessary to optimize the survey…
We present an analysis of surveying the inner Solar System for objects that may pose some threat to the Earth. Most of the analysis is based on understanding the capability provided by Sentinel, a concept for an infrared space-based…
In recent years, a great deal of emphasis has been placed on achieving the diffraction limit with large aperture telescopes. For a well matched focal-plane instrument, the diffraction limit provides the highest possible angular resolution…