Related papers: Sky Subtraction with Fiber-Spectrographs
Spectroscopy is one of the most important tools that an astronomer has for studying the universe. This chapter begins by discussing the basics, including the different types of optical spectrographs, with extension to the ultraviolet and…
The Spectral Energy Distribution (SED) mode of the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS) Space Telescope provides low-spectral resolution (R ~ 15-25) spectroscopy in the far infrared using the MIPS 70 um detector. A reflective…
The sky is a major component of the appearance of a photograph, and its color and tone can strongly influence the mood of a picture. In nighttime photography, the sky can also suffer from noise and color artifacts. For this reason, there is…
The first six months of flight data from the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS) were used to test MIPS reduction algorithms based on extensive preflight laboratory data and modeling. The underlying approach for the preflight…
High precision fast photometry from ground-based observatories is a challenge due to intensity fluctuations (scintillation) produced by the Earth's atmosphere. Here we describe a method to reduce the effects of scintillation by a…
The spectral resolution of a dispersive astronomical spectrograph is limited by the trade-off between throughput and the width of the entrance slit. Photonic guided-wave transitions have been proposed as a route to bypass this trade-off, by…
We apply the sky brightness modelling technique introduced and developed by Roy Garstang to high-resolution DMSP-OLS satellite measurements of upward artificial light flux and to GTOPO30 digital elevation data in order to predict the…
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…
Our knowledge of the lower solar atmosphere is mainly obtained from spectropolarimetric observations, which are often carried out in the red or infrared spectral range and almost always cover only a single or a few spectral lines. Here we…
While optical and quantum efficiency are on the rise, and spectrographs becoming massively multiplexed, measuring spectral energy distributions of astronomical sources with accuracy remains a challenge. In addition to atmospheric…
We describe the new spectroscopic data reduction pipeline for the multi-object MMT/Magellan Infrared Spectrograph. The pipeline is implemented in idl as a stand-alone package and is publicly available in both stable and development…
The Galactic O-Star Spectroscopic Survey (GOSSS) is an ambitious project that is observing all known Galactic O stars with B < 13 in the blue-violet part of the spectrum with R-2500. It is based on version 2 of the most complete catalog to…
Directly imaging and characterizing Earth-like exoplanets is a tremendously difficult instrumental challenge. Present coronagraphic systems have yet to achieve the required $10^{-10}$ broadband contrast in a laboratory environment, but…
The visual STELLA echelle spectrograph (SES-VIS) is a new instrument for the STELLA-II telescope at the Iza\~na observatory on Tenerife. Together with the original SES spectrograph - which will still be used in the near IR - and a new…
Fibre Bragg grating (FBG) OH suppression is capable of greatly reducing the bright sky background seen by near infrared spectrographs. By filtering out the airglow emission lines at high resolution before the light enters the spectrograph…
Quantifying the vertical distribution of atmospheric aerosols is crucial for estimating their impact on the Earth energy budget and climate, improving forecast of air pollution in cities, and reducing biases in the retrieval of greenhouse…
The burgeoning field of astrophotonics explores the interface between astronomy and photonics. Important applications include photonic OH suppression at near-infrared wavelengths, and integrated photonic spectroscopy. These new photonic…
The Earth's atmosphere affects ground-based astronomical observations. Scattering, absorption, and radiation processes deteriorate the signal-to-noise ratio of the data received. For scheduling astronomical observations it is, therefore,…
Opacity is a property of many plasmas, and it is normally expected that if an emission line in a plasma becomes optically thick, its intensity ratio to that of another transition that remains optically thin should decrease. However,…
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…