Related papers: The Digitized Second Palomar Observatory Sky Surve…
Weak lensing by large-scale structure is an invaluable cosmological tool given that most of the energy density of the concordance cosmology is invisible. Several large ground-based imaging surveys will attempt to measure this effect over…
We propose a solution to the problem of astrometric and photometric calibration of coronagraphic images with a simple optical device which, in theory, is easy to use. Our design uses the Fraunhofer approximation of Fourier optics. Placing a…
This paper describes the processing applied to the HFI cleaned time-ordered data to produce photometrically calibrated maps. HFI observes the sky over a broad range of frequencies, from 100 to 857 GHz. To get the best accuracy on the…
The detection and characterisation of extra-solar planets is a major theme driving modern astronomy, with the vast majority of such measurements being achieved by Doppler radial-velocity and transit observations. Another technique -- direct…
The creation of precise and high-resolution crop point clouds in agricultural fields has become a key challenge for high-throughput phenotyping applications. This work implements a novel calibration method to calibrate the laser scanning…
Galaxies are complex systems made up of different structural components such as bulges, discs, and bars. Understanding galaxy evolution requires unveiling, independently, their history of stellar mass and metallicity assembly. We introduce…
Foreground mitigation is critical to all next-generation radio interferometers that target cosmology using the redshifted neutral hydrogen 21 cm emission line. Attempts to remove this foreground emission have led to new analysis techniques…
Commercial flatbed scanners have the potential to deliver a quick and efficient means of capturing the scientific content of spectra recorded on photographic plates. We discuss the digitization of selected spectra in the Dominion…
The Blanco Cosmology Survey (BCS) is a 60 night imaging survey of $\sim$80 deg$^2$ of the southern sky located in two fields: ($\alpha$,$\delta$)= (5 hr, $-55^{\circ}$) and (23 hr, $-55^{\circ}$). The survey was carried out between 2005 and…
The large-scale structure is a major source of cosmological information. However, next-generation photometric galaxy surveys will only provide a distorted view of cosmic structures due to large redshift uncertainties. To address the need…
Intensive reverberation mapping monitoring programs combine ground-based photometric observations from different telescopes, requiring intercalibration of lightcurves to reduce systematic instrumental differences. We present a new iterative…
In two-dimensional spectrographs, the optical distortions in the spatial and dispersion directions produce variations in the sub-pixel sampling of the background spectrum. Using knowledge of the camera distortions and the curvature of the…
We overview the current status of photometric analyses of images collected with Multi Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) at 8-10m class telescopes that operated, or are operating, on sky. Particular attention will be payed to resolved stellar…
Autonomous digital sky surveys such as Pan-STARRS have the ability to image a very large number of galactic and extra-galactic objects, and the large and complex nature of the image data reinforces the use of automation. Here we describe…
High-precision photometric standard stars play a key role in enabling accurate photometric calibration and advancing various fields of astronomy. However, due to limitations in calibration methods and the limited availability and underuse…
Scientific exploitation of the ever increasing volumes of astronomical data requires efficient and practical methods for data access, visualisation, and analysis. Hierarchical sky tessellation techniques enable a multi-resolution approach…
We have built a reliable and robust system that takes as input an astronomical image, and returns as output the pointing, scale, and orientation of that image (the astrometric calibration or WCS information). The system requires no first…
Adaptive optics (AO) systems deliver high-resolution images that may be ideal for precisely measuring positions of stars (i.e. astrometry) if the system has stable and well-calibrated geometric optical distortions. A calibration unit,…
We present accurate photometric redshifts in the 2-deg2 COSMOS field. The redshifts are computed with 30 broad, intermediate, and narrow bands covering the UV (GALEX), Visible-NIR (Subaru, CFHT, UKIRT and NOAO) and mid-IR (Spitzer/IRAC). A…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is collecting photometry and intermediate resolution spectra for ~ 10**5 stars in the thick-disk and stellar halo of the Milky Way. This massive dataset can be used to infer the properties of the stars…