Related papers: The Faint Sky Variability Survey I: Goals and data…
We have used Voyager and Galex observations to map the diffuse Galactic light near the Galactic equator. We find that most of the observations are relatively faint with surface brightnesses of less than 5,000 photon units. This is important…
Weak gravitational lensing of the 21 cm radiation is expected to be an important cosmological probe for post-reionization physics. We investigate the reconstruction of the matter density perturbations using a quadratic minimum variance…
By observing bright and compact astronomical sources while also taking data with the 183 GHz Water Vapour Radiometers, ALMA will be able to measure the `empirical' relationship between fluctuations in the phase of the astronomical signal…
This paper presents optical night sky brightness measurements from the stratosphere using CCD images taken with the Super-pressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope (SuperBIT). The data used for estimating the backgrounds were obtained during…
We describe a system for rapidly measuring the brightness of the night sky using a mosaic of CCD images obtained with a low-cost automated system. The portable system produces millions of independent photometric measurements covering the…
With the arrival of the next generation of ultra-deep optical imaging surveys reaching $\mu_V$$\sim$30 mag/arcsec$^2$ (3$\sigma$; 10"$\times$10"), the removal of scattered light due to the point spread function (PSF) effect remains a…
The Surface Brightness Fluctuation method is one of the most reliable and efficient ways of measuring distances to galaxies within 100 Mpc. While recent implementations have increasingly relied on space-based observations, SBF remains…
We present the analysis of the faint galaxy population in the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) Early Release Observation fields VV 29 (UGC 10214) and NGC 4676. Here we attempt to thoroughly consider all aspects relevant for faint galaxy…
The high sensitivity of the new generation of radio telescopes such as the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will allow cosmological weak lensing measurements at radio wavelengths that are competitive with optical surveys. We present an…
This paper presents the CFH12K-VIRMOS survey: a deep B, V, R and I imaging survey in four fields totalling more than 17 deg^2, conducted with the 30x40 arcmin^2 field CFH-12K camera. The survey is intended to be a multi-purpose survey used…
The science goals for ground-based large-area surveys, such as the Dark Energy Survey, Pan-STARRS, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, require calibration of broadband photometry that is stable in time and uniform over the sky to…
The Faint Infrared Grism Survey (FIGS) is a deep Hubble Space Telescope (HST) WFC3/IR (Wide Field Camera 3 Infrared) slitless spectroscopic survey of four deep fields. Two fields are located in the Great Observatories Origins Deep…
We study the accuracy with which weak lensing measurements could be made from a future space-based survey, predicting the subsequent precisions of 3-dimensional dark matter maps, projected 2-dimensional dark matter maps, and mass-selected…
We have proposed a method for measuring weak lensing using the Lyman-alpha forest. Here we estimate the noise expected in weak lensing maps and power spectra for different sets of observational parameters. We find that surveys of the size…
The Fornax Spectroscopic Survey is a large optical spectroscopic survey of ALL 14,000 objects with 16.5<Bj<19.7 in a 12 sq.deg area of sky centered on the Fornax Cluster. We are using the 400-fibre Two Degree Field spectrograph on the…
Sky survey telescopes and powerful targeted telescopes play complementary roles in astronomy. In order to investigate the nature and characteristics of the motions of very faint objects, a flexibly-pointed instrument capable of high…
The VST Optical Imaging of the CDFS and ES1 Fields (VOICE) Survey is a Guaranteed Time program carried out with the ESO/VST telescope to provide deep optical imaging over two 4 deg$^2$ patches of the sky centred on the CDFS and ES1…
The weak-lensing science of the LSST project drives the need to carefully model and separate the instrumental artifacts from the intrinsic lensing signal. The dominant source of the systematics for all ground based telescopes is the spatial…
The determination of the galaxy luminosity function is an active and fundamental field in observational cosmology. In this paper we propose a cost effective way of measuring galaxy luminosity functions at faint magnitudes. Our technique…
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…