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We have developed a method to measure the mirror reflectivity of telescopes. While it is relatively easy to measure the local reflectivity of the mirror material, it is not so straightforward to measure the amount of light that it focuses…
Stray light in X-ray telescopes is a well-known issue. Unlike rays focused via a double reflection by usual grazing-incidence geometries such as the Wolter-I, stray rays coming from off-axis sources are reflected only once by either the…
Astronomers usually need the highest angular resolution possible, but the blurring effect of diffraction imposes a fundamental limit on the image quality from any single telescope. Interferometry allows light collected at widely-separated…
Optical interference is not only a fundamental phenomenon that has enabled new theories of light to be derived but it has also been used in interferometry for the measurement of small displacements, refractive index changes and surface…
Optical vortices (OVs) have emerged as a revolutionary concept in modern photonics, offering a unique method of manipulating light beyond conventional Gaussian beams. Despite their vast potential, phase topology stability remains…
Telescopes with unobstructed pupil are known to deliver clean point spread function (PSF) to their focal plane, in contrast to traditional telescopes with obstructed pupil. Recent progress in the manufacturing aspheric surfaces and mounting…
Oblique plane microscopy is a method enabling light-sheet fluorescence imaging through a single microscope objective lens by focusing on a tilted plane within the sample. To focus the fluorescence emitted by the oblique plane on a camera,…
We present a proposal of a new type of telescopes using a rotating parabolic strip as the primary mirror. It is the most principal modification of the design of telescopes from the times of Galileo and Newton. In order to demonstrate the…
The polarization and orbital angular momentum properties of light are of great importance in optical science and technology in the fields of high precision optical measurements and high capacity and high speed optical communications. Here…
Telescope arrays allow high-performance wide-field imaging systems to be built more quickly and at lower cost than conventional telescopes. Distributed aperture telescopes (the premier example of which is the Dragonfly Telephoto Array) are…
The Solar Corona Imager is an internally occulted coronagraph on board the ASO-S mission, which has the advantage of imaging the inner corona in H I {Lyman-\textalpha} (Ly-alpha) and white-light (WL) wavebands. However, scattering of solar…
A telescope specifically designed for the observation of the stellar aberration of light is proposed. It is distinctive in two main features: a lengthy collimated beam and an adjustable position of the photo-detector along the telescope…
Image plane beam combination in optical interferometers multiplexes the interference fringes from multiple baselines onto a single detector. The beams of starlight are arranged in a non-redundant pattern at the entrance of the combiner so…
A new instrumented baffle was installed in Spring 2021 at Virgo surrounding the suspended mirror in the input mode cleaner triangular cavity. It serves as a demonstrator of the technology designed to instrument the baffles in the main arms…
In astronomy and microscopy, distortions in the wavefront affect the dynamic range of a high contrast imaging system. These aberrations are either imposed by a turbulent medium such as the atmosphere, by static or thermal aberrations in the…
The weak-lensing science of the LSST project drives the need to carefully model and separate the instrumental artifacts from the intrinsic lensing signal. The dominant source of the systematics for all ground based telescopes is the spatial…
Scattered light from the objective lens, directly exposed to the intense sunlight, is a dominant source of stray light in internally occulted coronagraphs. The variable stray light, such as the scatter from dust on the objective lens, can…
Relative astrometric shifts between multiply lensed images provide a valuable tool to investigate haloes in the intergalactic space. In strong lens systems in which a single lens plays the primary role in producing multiple images, the…
Optical tweezers are highly versatile laser traps for neutral microparticles, with fundamental applications in physics and in single molecule cell biology. Force measurements are performed by converting the stiffness response to…
The strength and vertical distribution of atmospheric turbulence is a key factor determining the performance of optical and infrared telescopes, with and without adaptive optics. Yet, this remains challenging to measure. We describe a new…