Related papers: SORA: Stellar Occultation Reduction and Analysis
High-precision pulsar timing is central to a wide range of astrophysics and fundamental physics applications. When timing an ensemble of millisecond pulsars in different sky positions, known as a pulsar timing array (PTA), one can search…
The fields of occultation and microlensing are linked historically. Early this century, occultation of the Sun by the Moon allowed the apparent positions of background stars projected near the limb of the Sun to be measured and compared…
Current and future space-based observatories such as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and PLATO are set to provide an enormous amount of new data on oscillating stars, and in particular stars that oscillate similar to the…
The Taiwan-America Occultation Survey (TAOS) aims to determine the number of small icy bodies in the outer reach of the Solar System by means of stellar occultation. An array of 4 robotic small (D=0.5 m), wide-field (f/1.9) telescopes have…
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 exploration of kilometre-sized trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) is one of the ultimate goals in the search for the origin and evolution of the Solar System. However, such exploration is challenging because these small bodies are too faint…
Context. Recently our ability to study stars using asteroseismic techniques has increased dramatically, largely through the use of space based photometric observations. Work has also been done using ground based spectroscopic observations…
The observational basis for asteroseismology is being dramatically strengthened, through more than two years of data from the CoRoT satellite, the flood of data coming from the Kepler mission and, in the slightly longer term, from dedicated…
We introduce a novel algorithm, $\textit{COD}$ -- Compact Opacity Distribution, for shape reconstruction of a celestial body that has been observed to occult a star, using the photometric time-series observations of the occultation.…
Since July 2014, the ESA Gaia mission has been surveying the entire sky down to magnitude 20.7 in the visible. In addition to the millions of stars, thousands of Solar System Objects (SSOs) are observed daily. By comparing their positions…
Accurate measurements of statistical properties, such as the star formation rate and the lifetime of young stellar objects (YSOs) in different stages, is essential for constraining star formation theories. However, it is a difficult task to…
The sample of Solar system objects has dramatically increased over the last decade. The amount of measured properties (e.g., diameter, taxonomy, rotation period, thermal inertia) has grown even faster. However, this wealth of information is…
Transneptunian objects (TNOs) are a source of invaluable information to access the history and evolution of the outer solar system. However, observing these faint objects is a difficult task. As a consequence, important properties such as…
In recent years there appeared a need for astronomical observations timed with sub-millisecond accuracy. These include e.g. timing stellar occultations by small, sub-km or fast Near Earth Asteroids, but also tracking artificial satellites…
A novel method of generating artificial scintillation noise is developed and used to evaluate occultation rates and false positive rates for surveys probing the Kuiper Belt with the method of serendipitous stellar occultations. A thorough…
We derive analytic, closed form, numerically stable solutions for the total flux received from a spherical planet, moon or star during an occultation if the specific intensity map of the body is expressed as a sum of spherical harmonics.…
Natural (such as lunar) occultations have long been used to study sources on small angular scales, while coronographs have been used to study high contrast sources. We propose launching the Improved Resolution and Image Selection (IRIS)…
Digital co-addition of astronomical images is a common technique for increasing signal-to-noise and image depth. A modification of this simple technique has been applied to the detection of minor bodies in the Solar System: first stationary…
We present the pulsar_spectra software repository, an open-source pulsar flux density catalogue and automated spectral fitting software that finds the best spectral model and produces publication-quality plots. The Python-based software…
Context. Determining stellar characteristics such as the radius, the mass or the age is crucial when studying stellar evolution, exoplanetary systems or characterising stellar populations in the Galaxy. Asteroseismology is the golden path…