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This paper introduces a practical and accurate calibration method for camera spectral sensitivity using a diffraction grating. Accurate calibration of camera spectral sensitivity is crucial for various computer vision tasks, including color…
The achievable level of precision on photospheric abundances of stars is a major limiting factor on investigations of exoplanet host star characteristics, the chemical histories of star clusters, and the evolution of the Milky Way and other…
The current need for atomic data to model stellar spectra obtained in various wavelength ranges is described. The level of completeness and accuracy of these data is discussed.
Transforming the instrumental photometry of ground-based telescopes into a calibrated physical flux in a well-defined passband is a major challenge in astronomy. Along with the intrinsic instrumental difference between telescopes sharing…
The phenomenon of spectral mimicry refers to the fact that hypergiants and post-AGB supergiants - stars of different masses in fundamentally different stages of their evolution have similar optical spectra, and also share certain other…
Direct techniques for cosmic ray observations have reached an unprecedented level of precision, unveiling fine-details of the energy spectra. I will introduce the evidence for new spectral features which has been accumulated by new…
This white paper summarizes the conclusions of the Snowmass White Paper "Spectroscopic Needs for Imaging Dark Energy Experiments" (arXiv:1309.5384) which are relevant to the calibration of LSST photometric redshifts; i.e., the accurate…
The high accuracy of modern space astrometry requires the use of General Relativity to model the propagation of stellar light through the gravitational field encountered from a source to a given observer inside the Solar System. In this…
In fiber-based spectroscopy within telescopes, a prevailing limitation has been the necessity to align the fiber diameter with the telescope's seeing conditions, often characterized by the Full Width at Half Maximum of the point spread…
Much of the science that is made possible by multiwavelength redshift surveys requires the use of photometric redshifts. But as these surveys become more ambitious, and as we seek to perform increasingly accurate measurements, it becomes…
The last two decades have brought spectacular advances in astrophysics of cosmic rays (CRs) and space- and ground-based astronomy. Launches of missions that employ forefront detector technologies enabled measurements with large effective…
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…
Fibre-fed spectrographs now have throughputs equivalent to slit spectrographs. However, the sky subtraction accuracy that can be reached has often been pinpointed as one of the major issues associated with the use of fibres. Using technical…
Accurate astrometry and photometry of saturated and coronagraphic point spread functions (PSFs) are fundamental to both ground- and space-based high contrast imaging projects. For ground-based adaptive optics imaging, differential…
Stellar spectropolarimetry is a relatively new remote sensing tool for exploring stellar atmospheres and circumstellar environments. We present the results of our HiVIS survey and a multi-wavelength ESPaDOnS follow-up campaign showing…
Observing habitable exoplanets that may resemble Earth is a key priority in astronomy that is dependent on not only detecting such worlds, but also ascertaining that apparent signatures of habitability are not due to other sources. Space…
We describe several projects addressing the growth of galaxies and massive black holes, for which adaptive optics is mandatory to reach high spatial resolution but is also a challenge due to the lack of guide stars and long integrations. In…
There has been an incredibly large investment in obtaining high-resolution stellar spectra for determining chemical abundances of stars. This information is crucial to answer fundamental questions in Astronomy by constraining the formation…
In two-dimensional spectrographs, the optical distortions in the spatial and dispersion directions produce variations in the sub-pixel sampling of the background spectrum. Using knowledge of the camera distortions and the curvature of the…
The complexity and accuracy of current and future precision cosmology observational campaigns has made it essential to develop an efficient technique for directly combining simulation and observational datasets to determine cosmological and…