Related papers: Brightness Characterization and Modeling for Amazo…
The rapid growth of satellite constellations, particularly Starlink, is increasingly affecting ground-based astronomy. In this project, we developed a workflow to detect, identify, and measure the brightness of trails from artificial…
We report the discovery of four very bright, strongly-lensed galaxies found via systematic searches for arcs in Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5 and 6. These were followed-up with spectroscopy and imaging data from the Astrophysical…
In recent years, Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) mega-constellations have emerged as a promising network technology and have ushered in a new era for democratizing Internet access. The Starlink network from SpaceX stands out as the only…
We study the luminosity function of satellite galaxies around isolated primaries using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopic and photometric galaxy samples. We select isolated primaries from the spectroscopic sample and search…
We conduct a comprehensive and statistical study of the luminosity functions (LFs) for satellite galaxies, by counting photometric galaxies from HSC, DECaLS and SDSS around isolated central galaxies (ICGs) and paired galaxies from the…
The combination of visual and spectroscopic orbits in binary systems enables precise distance measurements without additional assumptions, making them ideal for examining the parallax zero-point offset (PZPO) at bright magnitudes (G < 13)…
The flux from distant type Ia supernovae (SN) is likely to be amplified or de-amplified by gravitational lensing due to matter distributions along the line-of-sight. A gravitationally lensed SN would appear brighter or fainter than the…
Starlink and alike have attracted a lot of attention recently, however, the inner working of these low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellite networks is still largely unknown. This paper presents an ongoing measurement campaign focusing on Starlink,…
The WISE satellite surveyed the entire sky multiple times in four infrared wavelengths (3.4, 4.6, 12, and $22\,\mu$m; Wright et al. 2010). The unprecedented combination of coverage area and depth gives us the opportunity to measure the…
The number of satellites on low orbit has dramatically increased over the past years, raising concerns among the astronomical community about their impact on observations. Spectroscopic observations represent a large fraction of…
Four observations of Starlink's LEO communication satellites, Darksat and STARLINK-1113, were conducted on two nights with two telescopes. The Chakana 0.6\,m telescope at the Ckoirama observatory (Chile) observed both satellites on…
The WISE satellite surveyed the entire sky multiple times in four infrared (IR) wavelengths ($3.4,\ 4.6,\ 12,$ and $22\, \mu$m, Wright et al. 2010). This all-sky IR photometric survey makes it possible to leverage many of the large publicly…
The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS shows a weak cometary activity. Its brightness suggests a maximum radius of ~10km (A/0.05)^{-1/2} for an asteroid with an albedo A. I show that interstellar objects with that radius would amount to an…
ATLAST is a particular realization of LUVOIR, the Large Ultraviolet Optical Infrared telescope, a ~10 m diameter space telescope being defined for consideration in the 2020 Decadal Review of astronomy and astrophysics. ATLAST/LUVOIR is…
Using LAMOST spectroscopic data, we find a strong signal of a comoving group of stars in the constellation of Draco. The group, observed near the apocenter of its orbit, is 2.6 kpc from the Sun with a metallicity of -0.64 dex. The system is…
Starlink satellites can become extremely bright when sunlight reflects specularly to an observer on the ground. The observed brightness of such flares is consistent with a bidirectional reflectance function of the Starlink satellite…
We describe ten strong lensing galaxy clusters of redshift 0.26-0.56 that were found in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We present measurements of richness, mass and velocity dispersion for the clusters. We find that in order to use the…
The rapid deployment of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite constellations has enabled the emergence of in-orbit edge computing and data centers-interconnected satellites equipped with onboard computing capabilities and high-speed…
Mega-constellations in Low Earth Orbit have the potential to revolutionise worldwide internet access. The concomitant potential of these mega-constellations to impact space sustainability, however, has prompted concern from space actors as…
The i-band observing conditions at Dome A on the Antarctic plateau have been investigated using data acquired during 2008 with the Chinese Small Telescope ARray. The sky brightness, variations in atmospheric transparency, cloud cover, and…