Related papers: Monitoring Variability of the Sky
A few percent of all stars are variable, yet over 90% of variables brighter than 12 magnitude have not been discovered yet. There is a need for an all sky search and for the early detection of any unexpected events: optical flashes from…
Measuring the brightness of the night sky has become an increasingly important topic in recent years, as artificial lights and their scattering by the Earths atmosphere continue spreading around the globe. Several instruments and techniques…
The Gaia mission has observed over 2 billion stars repeatedly across the entire sky over 10 years, revealing the many astronomical objects that vary on human timescales from seconds to years. Its repeated astrometric, photometric,…
Many decades ago a search for variable stars was one of the main areas of astrophysical research. Such searches, conducted with CCD detectors rather than with photographic plates, became a by-product of several projects seeking…
Contemporary astronomy benefits of very large and rapidly growing amounts of data in all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, from long-wavelength radio waves to high energy gamma-rays. Astronomers normally specialize in data taken in one…
Forecasting optical turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere has been an ambitious challenge for the astronomical scientific community for several decades. While earlier research primarily focused on whether it was possible to predict optical…
The contemporary astronomy is flooded with an exponentially growing petabyte-scaled data volumes produced by powerful ground and space-based instrumentation as well as a product of extensive computer simulations and computations of complex…
There is an increasing number of large, digital, synoptic sky surveys, in which repeated observations are obtained over large areas of the sky in multiple epochs. Likewise, there is a growth in the number of (often automated or robotic)…
It is currently feasible to start a continuous digital record of the entire sky sensitive to any visual magnitude brighter than 15 each night. Such a record could be created with a modest array of small telescopes, which collectively…
The Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) is one of the most productive and influential photometric sky surveys in the history of observational astronomy. Originally designed to detect dark matter through gravitational…
An apparatus to search for optical flashes in the sky is described. It has been optimized for gamma ray bursts (GRB) optical counterparts. It consists of 2x16 cameras covering all the sky. The sky is monitored continuously and the data are…
The next decade of survey astronomy has the potential to transform our knowledge of variable stars. Stellar variability underpins our knowledge of the cosmological distance ladder, and provides direct tests of stellar formation and…
The Princeton Variability Survey (PVS) is a robotic survey which makes use of readily available, ``off-the-shelf'' type hardware products, in conjunction with a powerful set of commercial software products, in order to monitor and discover…
Over the past decade, sky surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have proven the power of large data sets for answering fundamental astrophysical questions. This observational progress, based on a synergy of advances in telescope…
The millimeter/sub-millimeter (mm/sub-mm) sky remains a rich but under-explored frontier for transient and variable phenomena. A wide-field, high-sensitivity instrument with a large aperture and degree-scale field of view would open this…
Cosmology contributes a good deal to the investigation of variation of fundamental physical constants. High resolution data is available and allows for detailed analysis over cosmological distances and a multitude of methods were developed.…
Optical and infrared observations have thus far detected more celestial cataclysms than have been seen in gravity waves (GW). This argues that we should search for gravity wave signatures that correspond to flux variability seen at optical…
In this speculative, millenial essay, I try to anticipate what sort of novel gravitational optics investigations might be observed, after it becomes possible to map and monitor roughly a trillion sources (of which a billion may be usefully…
The contemporary astronomical instruments have been producing the unprecedented amount of data. The largest part of this "data avalanche" is being produced by deep all-sky surveys yielding terabytes of raw data per night. Such a great data…
Astronomy is entering a new era as multiple, large area, digital sky surveys are in production. The resulting datasets are truly remarkable in their own right; however, a revolutionary step arises in the aggregation of complimentary…