Related papers: Packing the sky: coverage optimization and evaluat…
We have developed an atmospheric monitoring system for the Telescope Array experiment at Akeno Observatory. It consists of a Nd:YAG laser with an alt-azimuth shooting system and a small light receiver. This system is installed inside an air…
Current time-domain wide-field sky surveys generally operate with few-degree-sized fields and take many individual images to cover large sky areas each night. We present the design and project status of the Evryscope ("wide-seer"), which…
Interstellar dust is still a dominant uncertainty in Astronomy, limiting precision in e.g., cosmological distance estimates and models of how light is re-processed within a galaxy. When a foreground galaxy serendipitously overlaps a more…
We present a new, objectively defined catalog of candidate galaxy clusters based on the galaxy catalogs from the Digitized Second Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (DPOSS). This cluster catalog, derived from the best calibrated plates in the…
We present the results of a study along with a first prototype of a high precision system (? 1 arcsec) for pointing and tracking light (near-infrared) telescopes on board stratospheric balloons. Such a system is essentially composed by a…
This paper presents a scheme to deal accurately and efficiently with complex angular masks, such as occur typically in galaxy surveys. An angular mask is taken to be an arbitrary union of arbitrarily weighted angular regions bounded by…
We describe a system that builds a high dynamic-range and wide-angle image of the night sky by combining a large set of input images. The method makes use of pixel-rank information in the individual input images to improve a "consensus"…
A method is presented to exploit adaptive integration algorithms using importance sampling, like VEGAS, for the task of scanning theoretical predictions depending on a multi-dimensional parameter space. Usually, a parameter scan is…
Astrophotonics is the application of photonic technologies to channel, manipulate, and disperse light from one or more telescopes to achieve scientific objectives in astronomy in an efficient and cost-effective way. Utilizing photonic…
In this paper are reviewed various designs of advanced, multi-aperture optical systems dedicated to high angular resolution imaging or to the detection of exo-planets by nulling interferometry. A simple Fourier optics formalism applicable…
The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) would be the world's largest radio telescope with eventually over a square kilometer of collecting area. However, there are enormous challenges in its data processing. The using of modern distributed…
Starbugs are miniaturised robotic devices that position optical fibres over a telescope's focal plane in parallel operation for high multiplex spectroscopic surveys. The key advantage of the Starbug positioning system is its potential to…
Imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) used for ground-based gamma-ray astronomy at TeV energies use reflectors with areas on the order of 100m$^2$ as their primary optic. These tessellated reflectors comprise hundreds of mirror…
The CHARA Array is the longest baseline optical interferometer in the world. Operated with natural seeing, it has delivered landmark sub-milliarcsecond results in the areas of stellar imaging, binaries, and stellar diameters. However, to…
Interferometry is a powerful technique for making sensitive, high-fidelity images of the sky, but is limited in its ability to measure extended or diffuse emission. Better images of extended astronomical objects can be obtained by…
One of the challenges of X-ray astronomy is how to both collect large numbers of photons yet attain high angular resolution. Because X-ray telescopes utilize grazing optics, to collect more photons requires a larger acceptance angle which…
Identifying galaxy clusters through overdensities of galaxies in photometric surveys is the oldest and arguably the most economic and mass-sensitive detection method, compared to X-ray and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Effect surveys that detect the…
The design of an interferometric array should allow optimal instrumental response regarding all possible source positions, times of integration and scientific goals. It should also take into account constraints such as forbidden regions on…
The application of photonics to astronomy offers major advantages in the area of highly-multiplexed spectroscopy, especially when applied to extremely large telescopes. These include the suppression of the near-infrared night-sky spectrum…
This paper presents a catalogue of optimised pointings for differential photometry of 23,779 quasars extracted from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Catalogue and a score for each indicating the quality of the Field of View (FoV)…