Related papers: Light Streak Photometry and Streaktools
The Earth's atmospheric turbulence degrades the precision of ground-based astrometry. Here, we discuss these limitations and propose that, with proper treatment of systematics and by leveraging the many epochs available from the Korean…
We present a new technique for monitoring microlensing activity even in highly crowded fields, and use this technique to place limits on low-mass MACHOs in the haloes of M31 and the Galaxy. Unlike present Galactic microlensing surveys, we…
Stray light caused by scattering on optical surfaces and in the Earth's atmosphere degrades the spatial resolution of observations. We study the contribution of stray light to the two channels of POLIS. We test the performance of different…
The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) will observe $\sim$150~million stars brighter than $T_{\rm mag} \approx 16$, with photometric precision from 60~ppm to 3~percent, enabling an array of exoplanet and stellar astrophysics…
The idea of using stellar photometry for atmospheric monitoring for optical experiments in high-energy astrophysics is seemingly straightforward, but reaching high precision of the order of 0.01 in the determination of the vertical aerosol…
High precision fast photometry from ground-based observatories is a challenge due to intensity fluctuations (scintillation) produced by the Earth's atmosphere. Here we describe a method to reduce the effects of scintillation by a…
NASA's Kepler, K2 and TESS missions employ Simple Aperture Photometry (SAP) to derive time-series photometry, where an aperture is estimated for each star, and pixels containing each star are summed to create a single light curve. This…
We introduce a novel framework for upsampled Point Spread Function (PSF) modeling using pixel-level Bayesian inference. Accurate PSF characterization is critical for precision measurements in many fields including: weak lensing, astrometry,…
We present a flux calibration scheme for the PACS chopped point-source photometry observing mode based on the photometry of five stellar standard sources. This mode was used for science observations only early in the mission. Later, it was…
Accurate reconstruction of the spatial distributions of the Point Spread Function (PSF) is crucial for high precision cosmic shear measurements. Nevertheless, current methods are not good at recovering the PSF fluctuations of high spatial…
One of the most useful techniques in astronomical instrumentation is image slicing. It enables a spectrograph to have a more compact angular slit, whilst retaining throughput and increasing resolving power. Astrophotonic components like the…
We present an analysis of six independent on-sky datasets taken with the Keck-II/NIRC2 instrument. Using the off-axis point spread function (PSF) reconstruction software AIROPA, we extract stellar astrometry, photometry, and other fitting…
We investigate the effect of strong emission line galaxies on the performance of empirical photometric redshift estimation methods. In order to artificially control the contribution of photometric error and emission lines to total flux, we…
In recent years, astronomical photometry has been revolutionised by space missions such as MOST, CoRoT and Kepler. However, despite this progress, high-quality spectroscopy is still required as well. Unfortunately, high-resolution spectra…
Slitless spectroscopy eliminates the need for slits, allowing light to pass directly through a prism or grism to generate a spectral dispersion image that encompasses all celestial objects within a specified area. This technique enables…
We introduce a method of measuring a lower limit to the amplitude of surface differential rotation from high-precision, evenly sampled photometric time series. It is applied to main-sequence late-type stars whose optical flux modulation is…
We present a spectroscopic test confirming the potential of narrow-band optical imaging as a method for detecting star-forming satellites around nearby galaxies. To date the efficiency of such methods, and particularly the fraction of false…
We discuss the construction of a photometric redshift catalogue of Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), emphasizing the principal steps necessary for constructing such a catalogue -- (i) photometrically…
Consumer cameras, particularly onboard smartphones and UAVs, are now commonly used as scientific instruments. However, their data processing pipelines are not optimized for quantitative radiometry and their calibration is more complex than…
Current measurements of the weak lensing signal induced by large scale structure provide useful constraints on a range of cosmological parameters. However, the ultimate succes of this technique depends on the accuracy with which one can…