Related papers: The confusion limit on astrometry with SIM
MAVIS (the MCAO-Assisted Visible Imager and Spectrograph), planned for the VLT Adaptive Optics Facility, represents an innovative step in Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) systems, particularly in its operation at visible wavelengths…
FAME is designed to perform an all-sky, astrometric survey with unprecedented accuracy. It will create a rigid astrometric catalog of 4x10^7 stars with 5 < m_V < 15. For bright stars, 5 < m_V < 9, FAME will determine positions and…
Speckle Noise is the dominant source of error in high contrast imaging with adaptive optics system. We discuss the potential for wavefront sensing telemetry to calibrate speckle noise with sufficient precision and accuracy so that it can be…
In a few years astrometry with the venerable combination of Hubble Space Telescope and Fine Guidance Sensor will be replaced by SIM, GAIA, and long-baseline interferometry. Until then we remain a resource of choice for sub-millisecond of…
Observational astronomy is plagued with selection effects that must be taken into account when interpreting data from astronomical surveys. Because of the physical limitations of observing time and instrument sensitivity, datasets are…
The faintness of satellite systems in galaxy groups has contributed to the widely discussed "missing satellite" and "too big to fail" issues. Using techniques based on Tremaine & Richstone (1977), we show that there is no problem with the…
Astrometric jitter noise arises when starspots on a rotating stellar surface move in and out of view, shifting the photocenter. This noise may limit our ability to detect and weigh small, sub-Neptune-sized planets around active stars. By…
Photometric redshifts are a key tool to extract as much information as possible from planned cosmic shear experiments. In this work we aim to test the performances that can be achieved with observations in the near-infrared from space and…
The precision of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments, specifically its lensing reconstruction, has reached the limit where non-linear corrections cannot be ignored. Neglecting these corrections results in biased constraints on…
Spectral distortions of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) are sensitive to energy injection by exotic physics in the early universe. The proposed Primordial Inflation Explorer (PIXIE) mission has the raw sensitivity to provide…
Although nowadays advanced dense image matching (DIM) algorithms are able to produce LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) comparable dense point clouds from satellite stereo images, the accuracy and completeness of such point clouds heavily…
A hierarchy of statistics of increasing sophistication and accuracy is proposed, to exploit an interesting and fundamental arithmetic structure in the photon bunching noise of incoherent light of large photon occupation number, with the…
The concordance Cold Dark Matter model for the formation of structure in the Universe, while remarkably successful at describing observations on large scales, has a number of problems on galaxy scales. The Milky Way and its satellite system…
In astronomy and microscopy, distortions in the wavefront affect the dynamic range of a high contrast imaging system. These aberrations are either imposed by a turbulent medium such as the atmosphere, by static or thermal aberrations in the…
Context: The determination of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) of massive galaxies is one of the open problems in cosmology. Strong gravitational lensing is one of the few methods that allow us to constrain the IMF outside of the…
A key processing step in ground-based astronomy involves combining multiple noisy and blurry exposures to produce an image of the night sky with an improved signal-to-noise ratio. Typically, this is achieved via image coaddition, and can be…
Photometric measurements allow the determination of an asteroid's absolute magnitude, which often represents the sole means to infer its size. Photometric observations can be obtained in a variety of filters that can be unique to a specific…
Image symmetrization is an effective strategy to correct symmetry distortion in experimental data for which symmetry is essential in the subsequent analysis. In the process, a coordinate transform, the symmetrization transform, is required…
When a source star is gravitationally microlensed by a dark lens, the centroid of the source star image is displaced relative to the position of the unlensed source star with an elliptical trajectory. Recently, routine astrometric follow-up…
The extragalactic background radiation produced by distant galaxies emitting in the far infrared limits the sensitivity of telescopes operating in this range due to confusion. We have constructed a model of the infrared background based on…