Related papers: A Python Toolkit for Plotting Double Star Observat…
The Telescope to Observe Planetary Systems (TOPS) is a proposed space mission to image in the visible (0.4-0.9 micron) planetary systems of nearby stars simultaneously in 16 spectral bands (resolution R~20). For the ~10 most favorable…
The ability to collect unprecedented amounts of astronomical data has enabled the studying scientific questions that were impractical to study in the pre-information era. This study uses large datasets collected by four different robotic…
The body of photometric and astrometric data on stars in the Galaxy has been growing very fast in recent years (Hipparcos/Tycho, OGLE-3, 2-Mass, DENIS, UCAC2, SDSS, RAVE, Pan Starrs, Hermes, ...) and in two years ESA will launch the Gaia…
Geometric distortion (GD) critically constrains the precision of astrometry. Using well-established methods to correct GD requires calibration observations, which can only be obtained using a special dithering strategy during the…
We find ourselves on the brink of an exciting era in observational astrophysics, driven by groundbreaking facilities like JWST, Euclid, Rubin, Roman, SKA, or ELT. Simultaneously, computational astrophysics has shown significant strides,…
The study explored the usage of astronomical observations for the identification and tracking of artificial satellites. Spacecraft streaks on astronomical images are a growing issue for the astronomical community. The increasing number of…
Orbital motion in binary and planetary systems is the main source of precise stellar and planetary mass measurements, and joint analysis of data from multiple observational methods can both lift degeneracies and improve precision. We set…
The impact of large-scale constellations of satellites, is a concern for ground-based astronomers. In recent years there has been a significant increase in the number of satellites in Low-Earth Orbit and this trend is set to continue. The…
Understanding how galaxies form and evolve requires measuring their light distributions in images taken by telescopes. This process often involves fitting mathematical models to galaxy images to extract properties such as size, brightness,…
I present a brief summary of three different types of binary star - astrometric, spectroscopic and eclipsing - and tabulate the properties of these systems that can be determined directly from observations. Eclipsing binary stars are the…
Even though the technology of adaptive optics (AO) is rapidly maturing, calibration of the resulting images remains a major challenge. The AO point-spread function (PSF) changes quickly both in time and position on the sky. In a typical…
The analysis of experimental results with Python often requires writing many code scripts which all need access to the same set of functions. In a common field of research, this set will be nearly the same for many users. The qspec Python…
Asteroid detections in astronomical images may appear as trails due to a combination of their apparent rate of motion and exposure duration. Nearby asteroids in particular typically have high apparent rates of motion and acceleration. Their…
We present the Survey Footprint Explorer (v2.5.0), a browser-based interactive tool for visualising and comparing the sky footprints of major astronomical imaging surveys. The tool is implemented entirely in client-side JavaScript and…
We present a robust and fast algorithm for performing astrometry and source cross-identification on two dimensional point lists, such as between a catalogue and an astronomical image, or between two images. The method is based on minimal…
We describe photometric recalibration of data obtained by the asteroid survey LINEAR. Although LINEAR was designed for astrometric discovery of moving objects, the dataset described here contains over 5 billion photometric measurements for…
Astronomical data are typically irregular in time, e.g. the space (HIPPARCOS/TYCHO, KEPLER, GAIA, WISE etc.) and ground-based CCD (NSVS, ASAS, CRTS, SuperWASP etc.) and photographic (Harvard, Sonneberg, Odessa etc.) photometrical surveys.…
Intensive reverberation mapping monitoring programs combine ground-based photometric observations from different telescopes, requiring intercalibration of lightcurves to reduce systematic instrumental differences. We present a new iterative…
We suggest a new web-based approach for browsing and visualizing data produced by a network of telescopes, such as those of the ongoing TAOS and the forthcoming TAOS II projects. We propose a modern client-side technology and we present two…
Polarimetry of stars at optical and near-infrared wavelengths is an invaluable tool for tracing interstellar dust and magnetic fields. Recent studies have demonstrated the power of combining stellar polarimetry with distances from the Gaia…