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We report studies on the mitigation of optical effects of bright low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellites on Vera C. Rubin Observatory and its Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). These include options for pointing the telescope to avoid…
We develop a proto-model of an off-axis reflective telescope for infrared wide-field observations based on the design of Schwarzschild-Chang type telescope. With only two mirrors, this design achieves an entrance pupil diameter of 50 mm and…
The Simons Observatory (SO) will be a cosmic microwave background (CMB) survey experiment with three small-aperture telescopes and one large-aperture telescope, which will observe from the Atacama Desert in Chile. In total, SO will field…
One key advantage of single-mode photonic technologies for interferometric use is their ability to easily scale to an ever increasing number of inputs without a major increase in the overall device size, compared to traditional bulk optics.…
Reflective imaging systems form an important part of photonic devices such as spectrometers, telescopes, augmented and virtual reality headsets or lithography platforms. Reflective optics provide unparalleled spectral performance and can be…
The sustained increase of emissions of artificial light is causing a progressive brightening of the night sky in most of the world. This process represents a threat for the long-term sustainability of the scientific and educational activity…
The ~39-m European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) will be the largest telescope ever built. This makes it particularly suitable for sensitive polarimetric observations, as polarimetry is a photon-starved technique. However, the telescope…
Adaptive Optics is a prime example of how progress in observational astronomy can be driven by technological developments. At many observatories it is now considered to be part of a standard instrumentation suite, enabling ground-based…
The imaging and characterization of a larger range of exoplanets, down to young Jupiters and exo-Earths will require accessing very high contrasts at small angular separations with an increased robustness to aberrations, three constraints…
We discuss a new technology that promises large inexpensive mirrors. We argue that it should be possible to tilt a rotating viscous liquid by perhaps as much as a few tens of degrees. The tilted liquid parabolic surface is used as the…
The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) has two 8.4-m primary mirrors that produce beams that can be combined coherently in a "Fizeau" interferometric mode. In principle, the Fizeau PSF enables the probing of structure at a resolution up to…
We propose a form of a lens corrector at the prime focus of a hyperboloidal mirror that provides a flat field of view up to 3 deg diameter at image quality D_{80} < 0.8 arcsec in integrated (0.32-1.10 mcm) light. The corrector consists of…
Since the first observation of triple-lens gravitational microlensing in 2006, analyses of six more events have been published by the end of 2018. In three events the lens was a star with two planets; four involved a binary star with a…
Atmospheric turbulence and precise measurement of the astrometric baseline vector between any two telescopes are two major challenges in implementing phase referenced interferometric astrometry and imaging. They limit the performance of a…
The small size telescopes (SSTs), spread over an area of several square km, dominate the CTA sensitivity in the photon energy range from a few TeV to over 100 TeV, enabling for the detailed exploration of the very high energy gamma-ray sky.…
The DKIST is designed to deliver accurate spectropolarimetric calibrations across a wide wavelength range and large field of view for solar observations. Instruments deliver spectral resolving powers up to 300,000 in multiple cameras of…
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is a unique facility for survey astronomy that will soon be commissioned and begin operations. Crucial to many of its scientific goals is the achievement of sustained high image quality, limited only by the…
The performance of an adaptive optics (AO) system on a 100m diameter ground based telescope working in the visible range of the spectrum is computed using an analytical approach. The target Strehl ratio of 60% is achieved at 0.5um with a…
The time delay between the arrival of photons of multiple images of time variable sources can be used to constrain absolute distances in the Universe (Refsdal 1964), and in turn obtain a direct estimate of the Hubble constant and other…
The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) observatory will be deployed over two sites in the two hemispheres. Both sites will be equipped with four Large Size Telescopes (LSTs), which are crucial to achieve the science goals of CTA in the 20-200…