Related papers: FIRST Extra-Galactic Surveys: Practical Considerat…

Over the past decade, research in resolved stellar populations has made great strides in exploring the nature of dark matter, in unraveling the star formation, chemical enrichment, and dynamical histories of the Milky Way and nearby…

We propose an extension of the LSST survey to cover the northern sky to DEC < +30 (accessible at airmass <1.8). This survey will increase the LSST sky coverage by ~9,600 square degrees from 18,900 to 28,500 square degrees (a 50% increase)…

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…

Many lens surveys have hitherto used observations of large samples of background sources to select the small minority which are multiply imaged by lensing galaxies along the line of sight. Recently surveys such as SLACS and OLS have…

We propose a new strategy to probe the power spectrum on large scales using galaxy peculiar velocities. We explore the properties of surveys that cover only two small fields in opposing directions on the sky. Surveys of this type have…

Recently, it has been recognised that very large spectroscopic surveys (several million spectra) are required to advance our understanding of Dark Energy (via baryonic wiggles) and the detailed history of our Local Group of galaxies (via…

Diffraction fundamentally limits our ability to image and characterize exoplanets. Current and planned coronagraphic searches for exoplanets are making incredible strides but are fundamentally limited by the inner working angle of a few…

We know that magnetic fields are pervasive across all scales in the Universe and over all of cosmic time and yet our understanding of many of the properties of magnetic fields is still limited. We do not yet know when, where or how the…

The coming Planck and Herschel missions will survey the sky at unprecedented angular scales and sensitivities. Simulations are needed for better interpretating the results of the surveys and for testing new methods of, e.g., source…

Exoplanet research has shown an incessant growth since the first claim of a hot giant planet around a solar-like star in the mid-1990s. Today, the new facilities are working to spot the first habitable rocky planets around low-mass stars as…

We present a signal extraction utility written for the purposes of the Arecibo Legacy Fast ALFA survey (ALFALFA). This survey, when completed, will have covered 7000 square degrees of the high galactic latitude sky and should detect over…

Massive early-type galaxies represent the modern-day remnants of the earliest major star formation episodes in the history of the universe. These galaxies are central to our understanding of the evolution of cosmic structure, stellar…

Since the late 1970's, redshift surveys have been vital for progress in understanding large-scale structure in the Universe. The original CfA redshift survey collected spectra of 20-30 galaxies per clear night on a 1.5 meter telescope; over…

This paper analyses the relativistic stellar aberration requirements for the Space Interferometry Mission (SIM). We address the issue of general relativistic deflection of light by the massive self-gravitating bodies. Specifically, we…

Spatial approximations have been traditionally used in spatial databases to accelerate the processing of complex geometric operations. However, approximations are typically only used in a first filtering step to determine a set of candidate…

ULTIMATE-Subaru (Ultra-wide Laser Tomographic Imager and MOS with AO for Transcendent Exploration on Subaru) and WFIRST (Wide Field Infra-Red Survey Telescope) are the next generation near-infrared instruments that have a large…

GLIMPSE (Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire), a SIRTF Legacy Science Program, will be a fully sampled, confusion-limited infrared survey of the inner two-thirds of the Galactic disk with a pixel resolution of \~1.2"…

Large time-domain surveys, when of sufficient scale, provide a greatly increased probability of detecting rare and, in many cases, unexpected events. Indeed, it is these unpredicted and previously unobserved objects that can lead to some of…

In this paper we discuss how we can read a planets spectrum to assess its habitability and search for the signatures of a biosphere. After a decade rich in giant exoplanet detections, observation techniques have now reached the ability to…

Gravitationally lensed galaxies with magnification ~10-100 are routinely detected at high redshifts, but magnifications significantly higher than this are hampered by a combination of low probability and large source sizes. Magnifications…