Related papers: Seeing the sky through Hubble's eye: The COSMOS Sk…
I review the current state of determinations of the Hubble constant, which gives the length scale of the Universe by relating the expansion velocity of objects to their distance. There are two broad categories of measurements. The first…
Strong gravitational lensing by galaxy clusters is a fundamental tool to study dark matter and constrain the geometry of the Universe. Recently, the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields programme has allowed a significant improvement of…
I present a new FITS viewer designed to explore 3D spectral line data (in particular HI) and assist with visual source extraction and analysis. Using the artistic software Blender, FRELLED can visualise even large (~600^3 voxels) data sets…
The Mittelman-di Cicco-Walker (MDW) H$\alpha$ Sky Survey is an autonomously-operated all-sky narrow-band (3nm) H$\alpha$ imaging survey. The survey was founded by amateur astronomers and the northern sky (Decl. $\geq$ 0$^\circ$) is…
Nowadays medium-large size astronomical projects have to face the management of a large amount of information and data. Dedicated data centres manage the collection of raw and processed data and consequently make them accessible, typically…
In the past, researchers have mostly relied on single-resolution images from individual telescopes to detect gravitational lenses. We propose a search for galaxy-scale lenses that, for the first time, combines high-resolution single-band…
The Cosmology Large Angular Scale Surveyor (CLASS) is an array of polarization-sensitive millimeter wave telescopes that observes ~70% of the sky at frequency bands centered near 40GHz, 90GHz, 150GHz, and 220GHz from the Atacama desert of…
A major goal of modern astrophysics is to understand the processes by which the universe evolved from its initial simplicity, as seen in measurements of the Cosmic Microwave Background, to the universe we see today, with complexity on all…
The Planck Surveyor cosmic microwave background (CMB) imaging mission will make very sensitive maps of the whole sky at microwave, millimetre (mm) and sub-mm wavelengths. The steep source counts expected in the highest frequency Planck…
Current submillimetre surveys are hindered in their ability to reveal detailed information on the epoch of galaxy formation and the evolutionary history of a high-redshift starburst galaxy population. The difficulties are due to the small…
The two most powerful optical/IR telescopes in history -- NASA's Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes -- will be in space at the same time. We have a unique opportunity to leverage the 1.5 million kilometer separation between the two…
An array of large observational programs using ground-based and space-borne telescopes is planned in the next decade. The forthcoming wide-field sky surveys are expected to deliver a sheer volume of data exceeding an exabyte. Processing the…
Three-dimensional (3D) visualization has opened up a Universe of possible scientific data representations. 3D printing has the potential to make seemingly abstract and esoteric data sets accessible, particularly through the lens of…
For more that seventy years, the measurements of fluxes of galaxies at different wavelengths and derived colours have been used to estimate their corresponding cosmological distances. From the fields of galaxy and AGN evolution to precision…
Our current understanding of the low surface brightness universe is quite incomplete, not only in the optical, but also in other wavelength regimes. As a demonstration of the type of science which is facilitated by a virtual observatory, we…
The shapelets method for image analysis is based upon the decomposition of localised objects into a series of orthogonal components with convenient mathematical properties. We extend the "Cartesian shapelet" formalism from earlier work, and…
The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) has become a cornerstone of extragalactic astronomy. Since the last public catalog in 2015, a wealth of new imaging and spectroscopic data has been collected in the COSMOS field. This paper describes the…
Relational databases (DBs) are ideal tools to manage bulky and structured data archives. In particular for Astronomy they can be used to fulfill all the requirements of a complex project, i.e. the management of: documents, software (s/w)…
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 cosmological interpretation of weak lensing by large-scale structures requires knowledge of the redshift distribution of the source galaxies. Current lensing surveys are often calibrated using external redshift samples which span a…