Related papers: Cleaning sky survey databases using Hough Transfor…
Statistical weak lensing by large-scale structure -- cosmic shear -- is a promising cosmological tool, which has motivated the design of several large upcoming surveys. Here, we present a measurement of cosmic shear using coadded Sloan…
The cross-identification of sources in separate catalogs is one of the most basic tasks in observational astronomy. It is, however, surprisingly difficult and generally ill-defined. Recently Budav\'ari & Szalay (2008) formulated the problem…
Astrometric calibration of images with a small field of view is often inferior to the internal accuracy of the source detections due to the small number of accessible guide stars. One important experiment with such challenges is the Hubble…
We examine critically recent claims for the presence of above-atmosphere optical transients in publicly-available digitised scans of Schmidt telescope photographic plate material derived from the National Geographic Society-Palomar…
Scientific fraud is an increasingly vexing problem. Many current programs for fraud detection focus on image manipulation, while techniques for detection based on anomalous patterns that may be discoverable in the underlying numerical data…
Optical Earth observation satellites acquire images worldwide , covering up to several million square kilometers every day. The complexity of scheduling acquisitions for such systems increases exponentially when considering the…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is making a multi-colour, three dimensional map of the nearby Universe. The survey is in two parts. The first part is imaging one quarter of the sky in five colours from the near ultraviolet to the near…
The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) III project, has provided the largest survey of galaxy redshifts available to date, in terms of both the number of galaxy redshifts measured by…
Thanks to incredible advances in instrumentation, surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have been able to find and catalog billions of objects, ranging from local M dwarfs to distant quasars. Machine learning algorithms have greatly…
The number of satellites on low orbit has dramatically increased over the past years, raising concerns among the astronomical community about their impact on observations. Spectroscopic observations represent a large fraction of…
The HARPS spectrograph is showing an extreme stability close to the m s-1 level over more than ten years of data. However the radial velocities of some stars are contaminated by a spurious one-year signal with an amplitude that can be as…
Given the basic parameters of a cosmic shear weak lensing survey, how well can systematic errors due to anisotropy in the point spread function (PSF) be corrected? The largest source of error in this correction to date has been the…
We investigate the effects of potential sources of systematic error on the angular and photometric redshift, z_phot, distributions of a sample of redshift 0.4 < z < 0.7 massive galaxies whose selection matches that of the Baryon Oscillation…
New and forthcoming deep-wide surveys, from instruments like the HSC, LSST and EUCLID, are poised to revolutionize our understanding of galaxy evolution, by revealing aspects of galaxies that are largely invisible in past wide-area…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will carry out a digital photometric and spectroscopic survey over pi steradians in the northern Galactic cap. An array of CCD detectors used in drift-scan mode will image the sky in five passbands to a…
Astronomical images from optical photometric surveys are typically contaminated with transient artifacts such as cosmic rays, satellite trails and scattered light. We have developed and tested an algorithm that removes these artifacts using…
In most star formation history (SFH) measurements, the reported uncertainties are those due to effects whose sizes can be readily measured: Poisson noise, adopted distance and extinction, and binning choices in the solution itself. However,…
Searches for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) using large survey data often look for possible signatures of astroengineering. We propose to search for physically impossible effects caused by highly advanced technology, by carrying out…
Sky survey telescopes play a critical role in modern astronomy, but misalignment of their optical elements can introduce significant variations in point spread functions, leading to reduced data quality. To address this, we need a method to…
Every field of Science is undergoing unprecedented changes in the discovery process, and Astronomy has been a main player in this transition since the beginning. The ongoing and future large and complex multi-messenger sky surveys impose a…