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The ambitious science goals of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) have motivated a search for new and unexpected sources of systematic error in the LSST camera. Flat-field images are a rich source of data on sensor anomalies,…
Due to their short timescale, stellar flares are a challenging target for the most modern synoptic sky surveys. The upcoming Vera C. Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), a project designed to collect more data than any precursor…
The weak-lensing science of the LSST project drives the need to carefully model and separate the instrumental artifacts from the intrinsic lensing signal. The dominant source of the systematics for all ground based telescopes is the spatial…
Motivated by the recognition that variation in the optical transmission of the atmosphere is probably the main limitation to the precision of ground-based CCD measurements of celestial fluxes, we review the physical processes that attenuate…
As the frontier of precision astronomical photometry continues to advance, correcting for time-variable atmospheric transmission becomes increasingly important. We describe an observational approach to monitoring optical attenuation due to…
Surface solar irradiance varies on scales as small as seconds or meters due to scattering and absorption by the atmosphere. Clouds are the main driver of this variability, but moisture structures in the atmospheric boundary layer and…
One of the scientific goals of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) is to measure the evolution of dark energy by measuring subtle distortions of galaxy shapes due to weak gravitational lensing caused by the evolving dark matter…
Transmission spectra are differential measurements that utilize stellar illumination to probe transiting exoplanet atmospheres. Any spectral difference between the illuminating light source and the disk-integrated stellar spectrum due to…
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory's LSST Camera (LSSTCam) pixel response has been characterized using laboratory measurements with a grid of artificial stars. We quantify the contributions to photometry, centroid, point-spread function size,…
Stars exhibit a bewildering variety of rapidly variable behaviors ranging from explosive magnetic flares to stochastically changing accretion to periodic pulsations or rotation. The principal Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and…
High-fidelity simulated astronomical images are an important tool in developing and measuring the performance of image-processing algorithms, particularly for high precision measurements of cosmic shear -- correlated distortions of images…
The presence of fringing in astronomical CCD images will impact photometric quality and measurements. Yet its impact on the Vera C. Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) has not been fully studied. We present a detailed…
Image degradation impedes our ability to extract information from astronomical observations. One factor contributing to this degradation is ``dome seeing", the reduction in image quality due to variations in the index of refraction within…
We investigate the ellipticity of the point-spread function (PSF) produced by imaging an unresolved source with a telescope, subject to the effects of atmospheric turbulence. It is important to quantify these effects in order to understand…
Stellar activity patterns are responsible for jitter effects that are observed at different timescales and amplitudes. These effects are currently in the focus of many exoplanet search projects, since the lack of a well-defined…
The effect of a random phase screen on laser beam wander in a turbulent atmosphere is studied theoretically. The method of photon distribution function is used to describe the photon kinetics of both weak and strong turbulence. By bringing…
We present new experimental results on the development of turbulent spots in channel flow. The internal structure of a turbulent spot is measured, with Time Resolved Stereoscopic Particle Image Velocimetry. We report the observation of…
Models of quantum gravity suggest that the vacuum should be regarded as a medium with quantum structure that may have non-trivial effects on photon propagation, including the violation of Lorentz invariance. Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT)…
Substellar companions such as exoplanets and brown dwarfs exhibit changes in brightness arising from top-of-atmosphere inhomogeneities, providing insights into their atmospheric structure and dynamics. This variability can be measured in…
In this paper, we provide a novel dataset designed for camera invariant color constancy research. Camera invariance corresponds to the robustness of an algorithm's performance when run on images of the same scene taken by different cameras.…