Related papers: Asteroid Photometry with PIRATE: Optimizations and…

The nearly continuous light curves with micromagnitude precision provided by the space mission Kepler are revolutionising our view of pulsating stars. They have revealed a vast sea of low-amplitude pulsation modes that were undetectable…

The production of photometric light curves from astronomical images is a very time-consuming task. Larger data sets improve the resolution of the light curve, however, the time requirement scales with data volume. The data analysis is often…

Even from a light polluted city it is possible to observe Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) at opposition using a small telescope equipped with a CCD camera. In this paper, we will overview first the major NEA programs, continuing with planning…

The Planck mission, originally devised for cosmological studies, offers the opportunity to observe Solar System objects at millimetric and submillimetric wavelengths. We concentrate in this paper on the asteroids of the Main Belt. We intend…

Among the group of extrasolar planets, transiting planets provide a great opportunity to obtain direct measurements for the basic physical properties, such as mass and radius of these objects. These planets are therefore highly important in…

The Monitor project is a photometric monitoring survey of nine young (1-200Myr) clusters in the solar neighbourhood to search for eclipses by very low mass stars and brown dwarfs and for planetary transits in the light curves of cluster…

The Kepler mission has revolutionized our understanding of exoplanets, but some of the planet candidates identified by Kepler may actually be astrophysical false positives or planets whose transit depths are diluted by the presence of…

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…

High precision astrometry aims at source position determination to a very small fraction of the diffraction image size, in high SNR regime. One of the key limitations to such goal is the optical response variation of the telescope over a…

Many asteroid databases with lightcurve brightness measurements (e.g. WISE, Pan-STARRS1) contain enormous amounts of data for asteroid shape and spin modelling. While lightcurve inversion is not plausible for individual targets with scarce…

One of the main goals of the COROT mission is to get precise photometric observations of selected bright stars in order to allow the modelling of their interior through asteroseismology. However, in order to interpret the…

We have built and tested a compact, low-cost, but very-high-performance astronomical polarimeter based on a continuously rotating half-wave plate and a high-speed imaging detector. The polarimeter is suitable for small telescopes up to ~1 m…

We propose to use a modest fraction of the re-purposed Kepler mission time and apertures to greatly increase the quantity and quality of our knowledge of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) rotation and shape. NEAs are important for understanding…

Infrared measurements of asteroids are crucial for the determination of physical and thermal properties of individual objects, and for the understanding of the small-body populations in the solar system as a whole. But standard radiometric…

The ultra-precise photometric space satellite MOST (Microvariability and Oscillations of STars) will provide the first opportunity to measure the albedos and scattered light curves from known short-period extrasolar planets. Due to the…

With the advent of optical interferometers that will be coming online in the next decade, radial velocity searches for extra-solar planets will be complemented by high angular resolution astrometric measurements. In this paper, we explore…

The U.S. Naval Observatory Robotic Astrometric Telescope (URAT) project aims at a highly accurate (5 mas), ground-based, all-sky survey. Requirements are presented for the optics and telescope for this 0.85 m aperture, 4.5 degree diameter…

Kete is an open-source software package for quickly and accurately predicting the positions and magnitudes of asteroids and comets in large-scale, all-sky surveys. It can predict observable objects for any ground or space-based telescope.…

Large ground-based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics (AO) systems have ushered in a new era of high-resolution infrared photometry and astrometry. Relative astrometric accuracies of <0.2 mas have already been demonstrated from…

We have begun a large-scale photometric survey of nearby open clusters and star-forming regions, the Monitor project, aiming to measure time-series photometry for >10,000 cluster members over >10 sq.deg of sky, to find low-mass eclipsing…