Related papers: AO assisted spectroscopy with SINFONI: PSF, backgr…
It has been recently demonstrated that integrated optics could enhance accuracy, stability, and ease of use of stellar interferometry techniques. The subject of this thesis is the study of an optical component based on singlemode waveguides…
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…
A flux-calibrated high resolution spectrum of the airglow emission is a practical lambda-calibration reference for astronomical spectral observations. It is also useful for constraining the molecular parameters of the OH molecule and the…
Adaptive optics enables the deployment of interferometer-based spectroscopy without the need for moving parts necessary for scanning the interferometer arms. Here, we employ a Michelson Interferometer in conjunction with a Spatial Light…
Current cosmological analyses which use Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) observations combine SN samples to expand the redshift range beyond that of a single sample and increase the overall sample size. The inhomogeneous photometric calibration…
State-of-the-art coronagraphs employed on extreme adaptive optics enabled instruments, are constantly improving the contrast detection limit for companions at ever closer separations to the host star. In order to constrain their properties…
Context. Adaptive optics (AO) systems greatly increase the resolution of large telescopes, but produce complex point spread function (PSF) shapes, varying in time and across the field of view. This PSF must be accurately known since it…
The Crab region was observed several times by INTEGRAL for calibration purposes. This paper aims at underlining the systematic interactions between (i) observations of this reference source, (ii) in-flight calibration of the instrumental…
The limits for adaptive-optics (AO) imaging at high contrast and high resolution are determined by residual phase errors from non-common-path aberrations not sensed by the wavefront sensor, especially for integral field spectrographs, where…
Astronomical precision spectroscopy underpins searches for life beyond Earth, direct observation of the expanding Universe and constraining the potential variability of physical constants across cosmological scales. Laser frequency combs…
Radial velocity instruments require high spectral resolution and extreme thermo-mecanical stability, even more difficult to achieve in near-infra red (NIR) where the spectrograph has to be cooled down. For a seeing-limited spectrograph, the…
Photometric calibration is currently the dominant source of systematic uncertainty in exploiting type Ia supernovae to determine the nature of the dark energy. We review our ongoing program to address this calibration challenge by…
Astronomers usually need the highest angular resolution possible, but the blurring effect of diffraction imposes a fundamental limit on the image quality from any single telescope. Interferometry allows light collected at widely-separated…
Current optical interferometers are affected by unknown turbulent phases on each telescope. In the field of radio-interferometry, the self-calibration technique is a powerful tool to process interferometric data with missing phase…
Access to knowledge of the point spread function (PSF) of adaptive optics(AO)-assisted observations is still a major limitation when processing AO data. This limitation is particularly important when image analysis requires the use of…
We describe a new concept to correct for scintillation noise on high-precision photometry in large and extremely large telescopes using telemetry data from adaptive optics (AO) systems. Most wide-field AO systems designed for the current…
Anisoplanatic effects can cause significant systematic photometric uncertainty in the analysis of dense stellar fields observed with adaptive optics. Program packages have been developed for a spatially variable PSF, but they require that a…
Integral-field spectroscopy is the most effective method of exploiting the superb image quality of the ESO-VLT, allowing complex astrophysical processes to be probed on the angular scales currently accessible only for imaging data, but with…
Diverse applications in photonics and microwave engineering require a means of measurement of the instantaneous frequency of a signal. A photonic implementation typically applies an interferometer equipped with three or more output ports to…
SPIFFI is an AO-fed integral field spectrograph operating as part of SINFONI on the VLT, which will be upgraded and reused as SPIFFIER in the new VLT instrument ERIS. In January 2016, we used new technology developments to perform an early…