Related papers: The beginning of celestial navigation
The great development of astrometric accuracy since the observations by Hipparchus about 150 BC was documented in 2008 in the first version of the present report. This report was updated in H{\o}g (2017d), e.g. with recent information on…
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence by looking for signals from advanced technological civilizations has been ongoing for some decades. We suggest that it could possibly be made more efficient by focusing on stars from which the…
Contemporary astronomy benefits of very large and rapidly growing amounts of data in all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, from long-wavelength radio waves to high energy gamma-rays. Astronomers normally specialize in data taken in one…
Gravitational-wave detectors with sensitivities sufficient to measure the radiation from astrophysical sources are rapidly coming into existence. By the end of this decade, there will exist several ground-based instruments in North America,…
Four hundred years after its publication, Galileo's masterpiece Sidereus Nuncius is still a mine of useful information for historians of science and astronomy. In his short book Galileo reports a large amount of data that, despite its age,…
Soon after the discovery of the first extrasolar X-Ray sources it was suggested that polarimetry could play a major role as a diagnostic tool. Attempts to measure polarization of X-Ray sources was performed by the team of Columbia…
Astronomical adaptive optics systems are used to increase effective telescope resolution. However, they cannot be used to observe the whole sky since one or more natural guide stars of sufficient brightness must be found within the…
Since the very beginning of astronomy the location of objects on the sky has been a fundamental observational quantity that has been taken for granted. While precise two dimensional positional information is easy to obtain for observations…
Fundamental changes are taking place in the way we do astronomy. In twenty years time, it is likely that most astronomers will never go near a cutting-edge telescope, which will be much more efficiently operated in service mode. They will…
Astronomy is one of the most data-intensive of the sciences. Data technology is accelerating the quality and effectiveness of its research, and the rate of astronomical discovery is higher than ever. As a result, many view astronomy as…
Using a portable star tracking system, we are able to obtain the geographical position of the observer, longitude, latitude and North direction. In this work, a new optimization method has been applied to improve accuracy in calculation of…
Astronomy has been at the forefront of the development of the techniques and methodologies of data intensive science for over a decade with large sky surveys and distributed efforts such as the Virtual Observatory. However, it faces a new…
Astronomical images are of crucial importance for astronomers since they contain a lot of information about celestial bodies that can not be directly accessible. Most of the information available for the analysis of these objects starts…
Sky surveys represent a fundamental data basis for astronomy. We use them to map in a systematic way the universe and its constituents, and to discover new types of objects or phenomena. We review the subject, with an emphasis on the…
The answers to fundamental science questions in astrophysics, ranging from the history of the expansion of the universe to the sizes of nearby stars, hinge on our ability to make precise measurements of diverse astronomical objects. As our…
Astronomical polarimetry is a powerful technique that can provide physical information sometimes difficult or impossible to obtain by any other type of observation. Almost every class of binary star can benefit from polarimetric…
Usually, positions of spacecraft on interplanetary or deep space missions are determined by radar tracking from ground stations, a method by which uncertainty increases with distance from Earth. As an alternative, a spacecraft equipped with…
Solar astrometry deals with the accurate measumerent of the solar diameter, and in general with the measurement of the shape of the Sun. During the last decades several techniques have been developed to monitor the radius and the irradiance…
This paper provides an overview of the birth and early development of Indian astronomy. Taking account of significant new findings from archaeology and literary analysis, it is shown that early mathematical astronomy arose in India in the…
Polarimetry remains a largely unexploited technique in observational X-ray astronomy which could provide insight in the study of the strong gravity and magnetic fields at the core of the Constellation-X observational program. Adding a…