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This article is the written version of the closing talk presented at the conference `A Century of Cosmology' held at San Servolo, Italy, in August 2007. I focus on the prospects of constraining fundamental physics from cosmological…
As our successful Mons campaign to observe WR140 has shown, there is a strong interest among both amateur and professional astronomers to collaborate on specific scientific questions. I highlight here some recent examples of successful…
I discuss the scientific rationale and opportunities in the study of high energy particle accelerators away from the Earth; mostly, those outside the Solar System. I also briefly outline the features to be desired in telescopes used to…
Motivated by efforts to return humanity to the Moon, three cases are reviewed for X-ray astronomy from the lunar surface: (1) Facilitation of ambitious engineering designs including high throughput telescopes, long focal length optics and…
Simulation of human motion is the subject of study in a number of disciplines: Biomechanics, Robotics, Computer Animation, Control Theory, Neurophysiology, Medicine, Ergonomics. Since the author has never visited any of these fields, this…
Rational observers are to be constructed for rational systems while polynomial observers are to be constructed for polynomial systems. An observer synthesis procedure is formulated. First an output-based rational realization is synthesized…
Near distances are overestimated in virtual reality, and far distances are underestimated, but an explanation for these distortions remains elusive. One potential concern is that whilst the eye rotates to look at the virtual scene, the…
Amateur and professional astronomers can easily capture a large number of deep sky images with recent smart telescopes. However, afterwards verification is still required to check whether the celestial objects targeted are actually visible…
Cosmological observations usually map our present-day past light cone. However, it is also possible to compare different past light cones. This is the concept behind the redshift drift, a model-independent probe of fundamental cosmology. In…
I review some of the past and current methods for retrieval of literature and other published information, excluding commercial services. Much of this is a personal view and based on experience made at various institutions, some of them…
As the Universe expands, the redshift of distant sources changes with time. Here we discuss gravitational lensing phenomena that are consequence of the redshift drift between lensed source, gravitational lens, and observer. When the source…
The article describes observations of the crescent of Venus and other bright planets using a large camera obscura. The goal of the article is to demonstrate that these observations can be successfully performed. Achieving positive results…
The procedure that is currently employed to allocate time on telescopes is horribly onerous on those unfortunate astronomers who serve on the committees that administer the process, and is in danger of complete collapse as the number of…
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.…
The science of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is populated by isolated empirical findings, often tied to specific technologies, designs, and tasks. This situation probably lies in observing the wrong object of study, that is to say,…
In recent years, significant advances in computer vision have also propelled progress in remote sensing. Concurrently, the use of drones has expanded, with many organizations incorporating them into their operations. Most drones are…
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming astronomical research, yet the scientific community has largely treated this transformation as an engineering challenge rather than an epistemological one. This perspective article argues that…
We investigate some possible relations between physical observables and estimate the "cosmic variance" which affects these measurements. We focus on redshift and angular-distance and we discuss the difference in considering the redshift as…
This paper develops a robust optimization based method to design orbits on which the sensory perception of the desired physical quantities are maximized. It also demonstrates how to incorporate various constraints imposed by many spacecraft…
Conference attendance is fundamental for a successful career in astronomy. However, many factors limit such attendance in ways that can disproportionately affect women and minorities more. In this white paper, we present the results of a…