Related papers: AIROPA III: Testing Simulated and On-Sky Data
Astronomical telescopes suffer from a tradeoff between field of view (FoV) and image resolution: increasing the FoV leads to an optical field that is under-sampled by the science camera. This work presents a novel computational imaging…
In this paper we present the approach we have used to determine and account for the anisoplanatic point spread function (PSF) in deep adaptive optics (AO) images for the Survey of a Wide Area with NACO (SWAN) at the ESO VLT. The survey…
Context. Modern space telescopes are currently providing high-precision light curves for a large fraction of the sky, such that many new variable stars are being discovered. However, some stars have periodic variability with periods of…
Precise photometric and astrometric measurements on astronomical images require an accurate knowledge of the Point Spread Function (PSF). When the PSF cannot be modelled directly from the image, PSF-reconstruction techniques become the only…
The performance of adaptive optics systems is partially dependant on the algorithms used within the real-time control system to compute wavefront slope measurements. We demonstrate use of a matched filter algorithm for the processing of…
Adaptive optics (AO) has revolutionized imaging in {fields} from astronomy to microscopy by correcting optical aberrations. In label-free microscopes, however, conventional AO faces limitations due to the absence of guidestar and the need…
The ultimate goal of the "Pi of the Sky" apparatus is observation of optical flashes of astronomical origin and other light sources variable on short timescales. We search mainly for optical emission of Gamma Ray Bursts, but also for…
It is widely believed that adaptive optics only has a role in correcting turbulent wavefronts on large telescopes using very bright reference stars. Unfortunately these are very scarce and many astronomical targets require wavefront…
Accurate and precise measurements of the Hubble constant are critical for testing our current standard cosmological model and revealing possibly new physics. With Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging, each strong gravitational lens system…
We present a novel automatic adaptive aperture photometry algorithm for measuring the total magnitudes of merging galaxies with irregular shapes. First, we use a morphological pattern recognition routine for identifying the shape of an…
We describe a new code for the deep analysis of stellar fields, designed for Adaptive Optics Nyquist-sampled images with high and low Strehl ratio. The Point Spread Function is extracted directly from the image frame, to take into account…
The very high spatial resolution provided by Adaptive Optics assisted spectroscopic observations at 8m-class telescopes (e.g. with SINFONI at the VLT) will allow to greatly increase the number of direct black hole (BH) mass measurements…
Bright single and binary stars were observed at the 4.1-m telescope with a fast electron-multiplication camera in the regime of partial turbulence correction by the visible-light adaptive optics system. We compare the angular resolution…
Initially designed to detect and characterize exoplanets, extreme adaptive optics systems (AO) open a new window on the solar system by resolving its small bodies. Nonetheless, despite the always increasing performances of AO systems, the…
PRAIA - Package for the Reduction of Astronomical Images Automatically - is a suite of astrometric and photometric tasks designed to cope with huge amounts of heterogeneous observations with fast processing, no human intervention, minimum…
Accurate astrometry is a key deliverable for the next generation of multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) systems. The MCAO Visible Imager and Spectrograph (MAVIS) is being designed for the Very Large Telescope Adaptive Optics Facility and…
We report on the limitations of sky subtraction accuracy for long duration fibre-optic multi-object spectroscopy of faint astronomical sources during long duration exposures. We show that while standard sky subtraction techniques yield…
Context. Adaptive optics (AO) is now a tool commonly deployed in astronomy. The real time correction of the atmospheric turbulence that AO enables allows telescopes to perform close to the diffraction limit at the core of their point spread…
Anisoplanatic effects can cause significant systematic photometric uncertainty in the analysis of dense stellar fields observed with adaptive optics. Program packages have been developed for a spatially variable PSF, but they require that a…
Multi-conjugated adaptive optics (MCAO) yield nearly diffraction-limited images at 2$\mu$m wavelengths. Currently, GeMS/GSAOI at Gemini South is the only MCAO facility instrument at an 8m telescope. Using real data and for the first time,…