Related papers: Confusion errors in astrometry and counterpart ass…

Flux estimates for faint sources or transients are systematically biased high because there are far more truly faint sources than bright. Corrections which account for this effect are presented as a function of signal-to-noise ratio and the…

The flux density from undetected sources in the observing beam of a telescope produces source confusion noise in the resulting maps of the sky, and thus limits sensitivity. In a recent paper we discussed this effect in the…

Spatial intensity moments computed on images can be used as a probe of the centroid, size, and orientation of pixelized sources such as stars and galaxies. However, all measurements made on images suffer from errors due to undersampling and…

Source confusion has been a long-standing problem in the astronomical history. In the previous formulation, sources are assumed to be distributed homogeneously on the sky. This fundamental assumption is not realistic in many applications.…

An important requirement for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) is to carry out precision astrometry in crowded fields. This capability is crucial, for example, to accurately measure proper motions of bright stars in nearby galaxies.…

The accuracy of position measurements on stellar targets with the future Space Interferometry Mission (SIM) will be limited not only by photon noise and by the properties of the instrument (design, stability, etc.) and the overall…

We systematically investigate the error sources for high-precision astrometry from adaptive optics based near-infrared imaging data. We focus on the application in the crowded stellar field in the Galactic Center. We show that at the level…

If gravitational microlensing occurs in a binary-source system, both source components are magnified, and the resulting light curve deviates from the standard one of a single source event. However, in most cases only one source component is…

Stacking analysis is a means of detecting faint sources using a priori position information to estimate an aggregate signal from individually undetected objects. Confusion severely limits the effectiveness of stacking in deep surveys with…

In the presence of strong clustering, low-resolution surveys measure the summed contributions of groups of sources within the beam. The counts of bright intensity peaks are therefore shifted to higher flux levels compared to the counts of…

To perform precise and accurate photometric catalogue cross-matches -- assigning counterparts between two separate datasets -- we need to describe all possible sources of uncertainty in object position. With ever-increasing time baselines…

Fluctuations in the brightness of the background radiation can lead to confusion with real point sources. Such background emission confusion will be important for infrared observations with relatively large beam sizes since the amount of…

Because of their limited angular resolution, far-infrared telescopes are usually affected by confusion phenomenon. Since several galaxies can be located in the same instrumental beam, only the brightest objects emerge from the fluctuations…

The relationship between the clustering of dark matter and that of luminous matter is often described using the bias parameter. Here, we provide a new method to probe the bias of intermediate to high-redshift radio continuum sources for…

The cosmic far-infrared background is now well measured from 140 micron to 1 mm. Uncertainties remain at 100 micron (and even more at 60 micron). These are dominated by limitations of the zodiacal model. The nature of sources dominating the…

Astrometric microlensing will offer in the next future a new channel for investigating the nature of both lenses and sources involved in a gravitational microlensing event. The effect, corresponding to the shift of the position of the…

In real telescopes, the optical parameters evolve with time, and the degradation is often not uniform. This introduces variations in the image profile and therefore photo-centre displacements which, unless corrected, may result in…

The shape of the curves defined by the counts of radio sources per unit area as a function of their flux density was one of the earliest cosmological probes. Radio source counts continue to be an area of interest, used to study the relative…

I discuss an issue arising in analyzing data from astronomical surveys: accounting for measurement uncertainties in the properties of individual sources detected in a survey when making inferences about the entire population of sources.…

Simple models for lensing potentials that successfully reproduce the positions of quadruple images to high accuracy fail abysmally in reproducing the flux ratios of the multiple images, suggesting the presence of small scale structure…