Related papers: Towards a Continuous Record of the Sky
The Gaia mission has observed over 2 billion stars repeatedly across the entire sky over 10 years, revealing the many astronomical objects that vary on human timescales from seconds to years. Its repeated astrometric, photometric,…
(Abridged) Typically large telescope construction and operation costs scale up faster than their collecting area. This slows scientific progress, making it expensive and complicated to increase telescope size. A metric that represents the…
The Pierre Auger Observatory is a facility built to detect air showers produced by cosmic rays above 10^17 eV. During clear nights with a low illuminated moon fraction, the UV fluorescence light produced by air showers is recorded by…
A recurring question arises when trying to characterize, by means of measurements or theoretical calculations, the zenithal night sky brightness throughout a large territory: how many samples per square kilometer are needed? The optimum…
Having achieved 'first-light' right before the opening ceremony on September 25, 2016, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is being busily commissioned. Its innovative design requires ~1000 points to be measured…
Modelling techniques for the propagation of light pollution in the atmosphere allow the computation of maps of artificial night sky brightness in any direction of the sky, involving a large number of details from satellite data. Cinzano et…
Science is becoming very data intensive1. Today's astronomy datasets with tens of millions of galaxies already present substantial challenges for data mining. In less than 10 years the catalogs are expected to grow to billions of objects,…
The Transient Optical Sky Survey (TOSS) is an automated, ground-based telescope system dedicated to searching for optical transient events. Small telescope tubes are mounted on a tracking, semi-equatorial frame with a single polar axis.…
The contemporary astronomical instruments have been producing the unprecedented amount of data. The largest part of this "data avalanche" is being produced by deep all-sky surveys yielding terabytes of raw data per night. Such a great data…
Contrary to some widespread intuitive belief, the night sky brightness perceived by the human eye or any other physical detector does not come (exclusively) from high in the sky. The detected brightness is built up from the scattered…
We present a new analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey data aimed at producing a detailed map of the nearby (z < 0.5) universe. Using neural networks trained on the available spectroscopic base of knowledge we derived distance estimates…
Meteoroids entering the Earth's atmosphere can be observed as meteors, thereby providing useful information on their formation and hence on their parent bodies. We developed a data reduction software package for double station meteor data…
The ongoing microlensing searches have generated more photometric measurements of pulsating stars than all previous observing projects combined. In particular, OGLE has made ~ 340,000 B, V, and I-band measurements of ~ 1,300 Cepheids in the…
The sky observed by space telescopes in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) can be dominated by stray light from multiple sources including the Earth, Sun and Moon. This stray light presents a significant challenge to missions that aim to make a secure…
The Universe is almost totally unexplored at low surface brightness levels. In spite of great progress in the construction of large telescopes and improvements in the sensitivity of detectors, the limiting surface brightness of imaging…
We measure seeing-corrected ellipticities for 2 x 10^6 galaxies with magnitude R<23 in 12 widely separated fields totalling 75 deg^2 of sky. At angular scales >30\arcmin, ellipticity correlations are detected at high significance and…
The fields chosen for the first observations of the cosmic microwave background with the Very Small Array have been surveyed with the Ryle Telescope at 15 GHz. We have covered three regions around RA 00h20m Dec +30deg, RA 09h40m Dec +32deg…
Astronomy began as a visual science, first through careful observations of the sky using either an eyepiece or the naked eye, then on to the preservation of those images with photographic media and finally the digital encoding of that…
Accurate relative spectrophotometry is critical for many science applications. Small wavelength scale residuals in the flux calibration can significantly impact the measurements of weak emission and absorption features in the spectra. Using…
We describe technical aspects of an astrometric and photometric survey of the North Celestial Cap (NCC), from the Pole (DEC=90 deg) to DEC=80 deg, in support of the TAUVEX mission. This region, at galactic latitudes from ~ 17 deg to ~ 37…