Related papers: Seeing-limited imaging sky surveys -- small vs. la…
In traditional seeing-limited observations the spectrograph aperture scales with telescope aperture, driving sizes and costs to enormous proportions. We propose a new solution to the seeing-limited spectrograph problem. A massively…
Sky surveys represent a fundamental data basis for astronomy. We use them to map in a systematic way the universe and its constituents, and to discover new types of objects or phenomena. We review the subject, with an emphasis on the…
The Universe is almost totally unexplored at low surface brightness levels. In spite of great progress in the construction of large telescopes and improvements in the sensitivity of detectors, the limiting surface brightness of imaging…
We develop the theoretical foundation for primary objective grating (POG) telescopy. In recent years, a wide range of telescope designs that collect the light over a large grating and focus it with a secondary receiving optic that is placed…
Remote sensing understanding inherently requires multi-resolution observation, since different targets and application tasks demand different levels of spatial detail. While low-resolution (LR) imagery enables efficient global observation,…
While many quality metrics exist to evaluate the quality of a grasp by itself, no clear quantification of the quality of a grasp relatively to the task the grasp is used for has been defined yet. In this paper we propose a framework to…
The primary instrument of the proposed EXIST mission is a coded mask high energy telescope (the HET), that must have a wide field of view and extremely good sensitivity. It will be crucial to minimize systematic errors so that even for very…
One of the problems of producing spectrographs for Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) is that the beam size is required to scale with telescope aperture if all other parameters are held constant, leading to enormous size and implied cost.…
Cost data for ground-based telescopes of the last century are analyzed for trends in the relationship between aperture size and cost. We find that for apertures built prior to 1980, costs scaled as aperture size to the 2.8 power, which is…
Open-access telescopes of all apertures are needed to operate a competitive and efficient national science program. While larger facilities contribute light-gathering power and angular resolution, smaller ones dominate for field of view,…
Telescope and detector developments continuously enable deeper and more detailed studies of astronomical objects. Larger collecting areas, improvement in dispersion and detector techniques, and higher sensitivities allow detection of more…
A concept of the ground-based optical astronomical observations efficiency is considered in this paper. We believe that a telescope efficiency can be increased by properly allocating observation tasks with respect to the current environment…
Radio astronomy has entered its golden era, with many revolutionary facilities such as SKA, ngVLA, and LOFAR2.0 coming online in the next decade. These facilities are certain to redefine radio astronomy. However, on smaller scales-such as…
Telescopes for observing the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) usually have shields and baffle structures in order to reduce the pickup from the ground. These structures may introduce unwanted sidelobes. We present a method to measure and…
Telescope scheduling is the task of determining the best sequence of observations (pointings and filter choices) for a survey system. Because it is computationally intractable to optimize over all possible multi-year sequences of…
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be a discovery machine for the astronomy and physics communities, revealing astrophysical phenomena from the Solar System to the outer reaches of the observable Universe. While many…
The Five-Hundred-Meter Aperture Spherical Radio Telescope(FAST) is the largest single-dish radio telescope in the world. In this paper, we make forecast on the FAST HI large scale structure survey by mock observations. We consider a drift…
Astronomical observations already produce vast amounts of data through a new generation of telescopes that cannot be analyzed manually. Next-generation telescopes such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the Square Kilometer Array…
Energy consumption and hardware cost of signal digitization together with the management of the resulting data volume form serious issues for high-rate measurement systems with multiple sensors. Switching to binary sensing front-ends…
Weak lensing provides a direct measure of the distribution of mass in the universe, and is therefore a uniquely powerful probe of dark matter. Weak lensing can also be used to measure the twin phenomenon of dark energy, via its effect upon…