Related papers: Image Quality Specification for Solar Telescopes
The imaging and spectroscopy of habitable worlds will require large-aperture space-based telescopes, to increase the collecting area and the angular resolution. These large telescopes will necessarily use segmented primaries to fit in a…
The effects of photon noise, aliasing, wavefront chromaticity and scintillation on the point spread function (PSF) contrast achievable with ground based adaptive optics (AO) are evaluated for different wavefront sensing schemes. I show that…
Accurate relative spectrophotometry is critical for many science applications. Small wavelength scale residuals in the flux calibration can significantly impact the measurements of weak emission and absorption features in the spectra. Using…
High precision astrometry aims at source position determination to a very small fraction of the diffraction image size, in high SNR regime. One of the key limitations to such goal is the optical response variation of the telescope over a…
The Gemini Multi-conjugate Adaptive Optics System - GeMS, a facility instrument mounted on the Gemini South telescope, delivers a uniform, near diffraction limited images at near infrared wavelengths (0.95 microns- 2.5 microns) over a field…
Transmission spectroscopy has proven to be an effective technique for characterizing exoplanet atmospheres. However, transmission spectroscopy requires planetary transits, which occur for only a small fraction of planetary systems due to…
We use a Lucky Imaging system to obtain I-band images with much improved angular resolution on a ground-based 2.5m telescope. We present results from a 10-night assessment campaign on the 2.56m Nordic Optical Telescope and quantify the…
The accuracy of ground-based astronomical photometry is limited by two factors: photon statistics and stellar scintillation arising when star light passes through Earth's atmosphere. This paper examines the theoretical role of the outer…
The High Resolution Camera (HRCam) speckle imager at the 4.1 m Southern Astrophysical Research telescope is a highly productive instrument that has accumulated about 40K observations to date. Its performance (detected flux, level of the…
We summarize the high-resolution science that has been done on high redshift galaxies with Adaptive Optics (AO) on the world's largest ground-based facilities and with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). These facilities complement each…
The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) is a unique telescope featuring two co-mounted optical trains with 8.4m primary mirrors. The telescope Adaptive Optics (AO) system uses two innovative key components, namely an adaptive secondary mirror…
We describe a new concept for a MEMS-based active spatial filter for astronomical spectroscopy. The goal of this device is to allow the use of a diffraction-limited spectrometer on a seeing limited observation at improved throughput over a…
Measurement of the brightness temperature of extended radio emission demands knowledge of the gain (or aperture efficiency) of the telescope and measurement of the polarized component of the emission requires correction for the conversion…
Ground-based telescopes coupled with adaptive optics (AO) have been playing a leading role in exoplanet direct imaging science and technological development for the past two decades and will continue to have an indispensable role for the…
Improving angular resolution is one of X-ray astronomy's big challenges. While X-ray interferometry should eventually vastly improve broad-band angular resolution, in the near-term, X-ray telescopes will sacrifice angular resolution for…
Observations of the Sun as a star have been key to guiding models of stellar atmospheres and additionally provide useful insights on the effects of granulation and stellar activity on radial velocity measurements. Most high resolution solar…
We present an analysis of high-resolution imaging of an exoplanet by a meter-class telescope positioned at a real image of the exoplanet created by the solar gravity lens. We assume an exoplanet viewed in full phase and a simple…
We overview the current status of photometric analyses of images collected with Multi Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) at 8-10m class telescopes that operated, or are operating, on sky. Particular attention will be payed to resolved stellar…
The use of small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) for applications in the field of precision agriculture has demonstrated the need to produce temporally consistent imagery to allow for quantitative comparisons. In order for these aerial…
Adding an independent estimate of the mean stellar density, $\rho_{\star}$, as a constraint in the analysis of stars that host transiting exoplanets can significantly improve the precision of the planet radius estimate in cases where the…