Related papers: Efficient absolute aspect determination of a ballo…
A well-adapted visible and infrared spectrograph has been developed for the SNAP (SuperNova/Acceleration Probe) experiment proposed for JDEM. The instrument should have a high sensitivity to see faint supernovae but also a good redshift…
Existing and planned optical telescopes and surveys can detect artificially-illuminated objects comparable in total brightness to a major terrestrial city out to the outskirts of the Solar System. Orbital parameters of Kuiper belt objects…
Photonic technologies offer numerous advantages for astronomical instruments such as spectrographs and interferometers owing to their small footprints and diverse range of functionalities. Operating at the diffraction-limit, it is…
The WALOP-South instrument will be mounted on the 1 m SAAO telescope in South Africa as part of the PASIPHAE program to carry out a linear imaging polarization survey of the Galactic polar regions in the optical band. Designed to achieve…
Transforming the instrumental photometry of ground-based telescopes into a calibrated physical flux in a well-defined passband is a major challenge in astronomy. Along with the intrinsic instrumental difference between telescopes sharing…
A beam tagging hodoscope prototype made of squared 1 mm$^2$ fibers arranged in two perpendicular planes and coupled to multi-anode photomultipliers has been studied using 65 MeV proton as well as 95 MeV/u $^{12}$C beams at various…
Type Ia supernovae are the most direct cosmological probe to study dark energy in the recent Universe, for which the photometric calibration of astronomical instruments remains one major source of systematic uncertainties. To address this,…
The concept of a recently proposed small-scale interferometric optical imaging device, an instrument known as the Segmented Planar Imaging Detector for Electro-optical Reconnaissance (SPIDER), is of great interest for its possible…
When inverting solar spectra, image degradation effects that are present in the data are usually approximated or not considered. We develop a data reduction method that takes these issues into account and minimizes the resulting errors. By…
The Position-Sensitive Detector (PSD) for photometrical and spectral observation on the 6-meter optical telescope of the Special Astrophysical Observatory (Russia) is described. The PSD consists of a position-sensitive tube, amplifiers of…
We introduce an interferometric technique for passive time-of-flight imaging and depth sensing at micrometer axial resolutions. Our technique uses a full-field Michelson interferometer, modified to use sunlight as the only light source. The…
We demonstrate a path to hitherto unachievable differential photometric precisions from the ground, both in the optical and near-infrared (NIR), using custom-fabricated beam-shaping diffusers produced using specialized nanofabrication…
Our team at the INAF-Astronomical Observatory of Padova and the University of Padova is engaged in the design, construction and operations of instruments with very high time accuracy in the optical band for applications to High Time…
A non-invasive, in-situ calibration method for Total Internal Reflection Microscopy (TIRM) based on optical tweezing is presented which greatly expands the capabilities of this technique. We show that by making only simple modifications to…
The existing techniques for measuring high-dimensional pure states of light in the orbital angular momentum (OAM) basis either involve a large number of single-pixel data acquisitions and substantial postselection errors that increase with…
We present an approach for in situ dynamic four-dimensional (4D=3D space + 1D time) laser induced strong field ionization tomography, particularly suited for measuring far-from-equilibrium systems, such as supersonic and hypersonic pulsed…
We present results from the first on-sky demonstration of a prototype astronomical integrated photonic spectrograph (IPS) using the Anglo-Australian Telescope near-infrared imaging spectrometer (IRIS2) at Siding Spring Observatory to…
Optical phase measurements play a key role in the detection of macroscopic parameters such as position, velocity, and displacement. They also permit to qualify the microscopic properties of photonic waveguides such as polarization mode…
The realization of low-cost instruments with high technical performance is a goal which deserves some efforts in an epoch of fast technological developments: indeed such instruments can be easily reproduced and therefore allow to open new…
We present a superpixel method for full spatial phase and amplitude control of a light beam using a digital micromirror device (DMD) combined with a spatial filter. We combine square regions of nearby micromirrors into superpixels by low…