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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 Big Occulting Steerable Satellite (BOSS), a large…
A prototype system for the Permanent All Sky Survey (PASS) project is presented. PASS is a continuous photometric survey of the entire celestial sphere with a high temporal resolution. Its major objectives are the detection of all…
We report on the determination of the visual orbit of the double-lined spectroscopic binary system 12 Bootes with data obtained by the Palomar Testbed Interferometer in 1998 and 1999. 12 Boo is a nearly equal-mass double-lined binary system…
The Swift mission, scheduled for launch in early 2004, is a multiwavelength observatory for gamma-ray burst (GRB) astronomy. It is the first-of-its-kind autonomous rapid-slewing satellite for transient astronomy and pioneers the way for…
The servo control algorithms of the TNG, developed in the nineties, have been working for more than 20 years with no major updates. The original hardware was based on a VME-bus based platform running a real time operating system, a rather…
Forecasting optical turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere has been an ambitious challenge for the astronomical scientific community for several decades. While earlier research primarily focused on whether it was possible to predict optical…
The Virgin Island Robotic Telescope is located at the Etelman Observatory, St Thomas, since 2002. We will present its evolution since that date with the changes we have performed in order to modify an automated instrument, needing human…
In recent decades, astronomy and astrophysics have experienced several fundamental changes. On one hand, there has been a significant increase in the observation of transient phenomena, which are short-lived events such as supernova…
Existing network analysis methods struggle to optimize observer placements in dynamic environments with limited visibility. This dissertation introduces the novel ROBUST (Ranged Observer Bipartite-Unipartite SpatioTemporal) framework,…
We report follow-up observations of transiting exoplanets that have either large uncertainties (>10 minutes) in their transit times or have not been observed for over three years. A fully robotic ground-based telescope network, observations…
Balloon-borne astronomy is a unique tool that allows for a level of image stability and significantly reduced atmospheric interference without the often prohibitive cost and long development time-scale that are characteristic of space-borne…
In time-domain astronomy, a substantial number of transients will be discovered by multi-wavelength and multi-messenger observatories, posing a great challenge for follow-up capabilities. We have thus proposed an intelligent X-ray…
The Asteroid Terrestrial impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) system consists of two 0.5m Schmidt telescopes with cameras covering 29 square degrees at plate scale of 1.86 arcsec per pixel. Working in tandem, the telescopes routinely survey the…
The detection and characterization of exoplanets have made huge progresses since the first discoveries in the late nineties. In particular, the independent measurement of the mass and radius of planets, by combining the transit and…
We describe a robotic learning system for autonomous exploration and navigation in diverse, open-world environments. At the core of our method is a learned latent variable model of distances and actions, along with a non-parametric…
Robo-AO is the first astronomical laser guide star adaptive optics (AO) system designed to operate completely independent of human supervision. A single computer commands the AO system, the laser guide star, visible and near-infrared…
Recent advances in astronomical observations have ushered in an era of remarkable discoveries. We now probe the Universe through multi-messenger signals, image the sky with unprecedented depth and resolution, and investigate individual…
The James Webb Space Telescope will revolutionize transiting exoplanet atmospheric science due to its capability for continuous, long-duration observations and its larger collecting area, spectral coverage, and spectral resolution compared…
Observations that require large physical instrument dimensions and/or a considerable amount of cryogens, as it is the case for high spatial resolution far infrared (FIR) astronomy, currently still face technological limits for their…
We have implemented upgrades to the University of Wyoming's Red Buttes Observatory (RBO) to allow remote and autonomous operations using the 0.6 m telescope. Detailed descriptions of hardware and software components provide sufficient…