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We present the 'simage' software suite for the simulation of artificial extragalactic images, based empirically around real observations of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF). The simulations reproduce galaxies with realistic and complex…
We are working on the development of a method for optimizing wide-field X-ray telescope mirror prescriptions, including polynomial coefficients, mirror shell relative displacements, and (assuming 4 focal plane detectors) detector placement…
We build on a long-standing tradition in astronomical adaptive optics (AO) of specifying performance metrics and error budgets using linear systems modeling in the spatial-frequency domain. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive tool for…
The Smart Focal Planes (SmartFP) activity is a European Joint Research Activity funded to develop novel optical technologies for future large telescope instrumentation. In this paper, we will discuss the image slicer developments being…
Adaptive optics (AO) have been used to correct wavefronts to achieve diffraction limited point spread functions in a broad range of optical applications, prominently ground-based astronomical telescopes operating in near infra-red. While…
In modern-day astronomy, near-infrared, optical, and ultraviolet spectroscopy are indispensable for studying a wide range of phenomena, from measuring black hole masses to analyzing chemical abundances in stellar atmospheres. However,…
The imaging and spectroscopy of habitable worlds will require large-aperture space-based telescopes, to increase the collecting area and the angular resolution. These large telescopes will necessarily use segmented primaries to fit in a…
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.…
Images obtained with single-conjugate adaptive optics (AO) show spatial variation of the point spread function (PSF) due to both atmospheric anisoplanatism and instrumental aberrations. The poor knowledge of the PSF across the field of view…
Chromatic point-spread-function (PSF) effects arise from differences between the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of stars, used to model the PSF, and galaxies, used to measure shape distortions due to weak gravitational lensing, or…
Spectropolarimetry, the observation of polarization and intensity as a function of wavelength, is a powerful tool in stellar astrophysics. It is particularly useful for characterizing stars and circumstellar material, and for tracing the…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure is an invaluable cosmological tool given that most of the energy density of the concordance cosmology is invisible. Several large ground-based imaging surveys will attempt to measure this effect over…
We present a theoretical analysis of the measuring algorithm we use when applying the Diffracto-Astrometry technique to Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) saturated stellar images. Theoretical Point Spread…
pyspeckit is a toolkit and library for spectroscopic analysis in Python. We describe the pyspeckit package and highlight some of its capabilities, such as interactively fitting a model to data, akin to the historically widely-used splot…
We show how the effects of azimuthal optical aberrations on singular light beams can result in an intensity modulation in the beam waist or focal point spread function (PSF) that is directly proportional to the amplitude of the applied…
Split-pulse x-ray photon correlation spectroscopy has been proposed as one of the unique capabilities made possible with the x-ray free electron lasers. It enables characterization of atomic scale structural dynamics that dictates the…
Image slicing is a powerful technique in astronomy. It allows the instrument designer to reduce the slit width of the spectrograph, increasing spectral resolving power whilst retaining throughput. Conventionally this is done using bulk…
Optical fibres are essential for many types of highly-multiplexed and precision spectroscopy. The success of the new generation of multifibre instruments under construction to investigate fundamental problems in cosmology, such as the…
Whether is ground-based or space-based, any optical instrument suffers from some amount of optical geometric distortion. Recently, the diffraction-limited image quality afforded by space-based telescopes and by Adaptive Optics (AO)…
Medical ultrasound provides images which are the spatial map of the tissue echogenicity. Unfortunately, an ultrasound image is a low-quality version of the expected Tissue Reflectivity Function (TRF) mainly due to the non-ideal Point Spread…