A history of Liquid Mirror Telescope (LMT) experimentation is provided. The concept can be traced to Ernesto Capocci of the Naples Observatory (1850), but it was not until 1872 that Henry Skey of the Dunedin Observatory in New Zealand constructed the rst working laboratory LMT. The 1909 experiments by Robert Wood at Johns Hopkins University exposed some of the strengths and weaknesses of the LM...

Microwave kinetic inductance detectors (MKIDs) are superconducting detectors capable of counting single photons and measuring their energy in the UV, optical, and near-IR. MKIDs feature intrinsic frequency domain multiplexing (FDM) at microwave frequencies, allowing the construction and readout of large arrays. Due to the microwave FDM, MKIDs do not require the complex cryogenic multiplexing el...

Turbulence in the earth’s atmosphere severely limits the resolution and sensitivity of astronomical observations. The vertical distribution of turbulence in the atmosphere has a profound effect on the residuals after correction by an active instrument such as adaptive optics or a fringe tracking interferometer. It has already been shown that the South Pole has turbulence profiles unlike those a...

The Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) instrument has been operating on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) since 1997. The data archive is now sufficiently large that it can be used to investigate instrumental properties and the variability of astronomical sources. This paper describes the automated calibration and reduction scheme used to process the archive data with part...

The Herschel Interactive Processing Environment (HIPE) was developed by the European Space Agency (ESA) in collaboration with NASA and the Herschel Instrument Control Centres to provide the astronomical community a complete environment to process and analyze the data gathered by the Herschel Space Observatory. One of the most important components of HIPE is the plotting system (named PlotXY) th...

We report transmission measurements at cryogenic temperatures for 4 broad-band filters of the Mauna Kea Observatories (MKO) near-infrared filter set and 5 narrow-band filters. The spectral scans were collected using the multi-mode IR instrument of the TNG telescope (NICS) in which these filters are permanently mounted and commonly used for astronomical observations. We determined the transmissi...

Astronomical seeing is quantified by a single parameter, turbulence integral, in the framework of the Kolmogorov turbulence model. This parameter can be routinely measured by a Differential Image Motion Monitor, DIMM. A new instrument, MultiAperture Scintillation Sensor (MASS), permits to measure the seeing in the free atmosphere above ∼0.5km and, together with a DIMM, to estimate the ground-la...

We report on the development of a prototype portable monitor for profiling of the altitude and velocity of atmospheric optical turbulence. The instrument is based on the SLODAR Shack-Hartmann wave-front sensing technique, applied to a portable telescope and employing an electron-multiplication (EM) CCD camera as the wave-front sensor detector. Constructed for ESO by the astronomical instrumenta...

A novel multi-object spectrometer (MOS) is being explored for use as an adaptive performance-driven sensor that tracks moving targets. Developed originally for astronomical applications, the instrument utilizes an array of micromirrors to reflect light to a panchromatic imaging array. When an object of interest is detected the individual micromirrors imaging the object are tilted to reflect the...

Errors in the planetary coordinates of the Astronomical Almanac are approximated by comparing their fundamental ephemerides, upon which they are based, with a more recent ephemeris. JPL’s DE200 provided the fundamental planetary and lunar ephemerides of the Astronomical Almanac for the years, 1984–2002, and DE405 has replaced DE200 in that role, starting in 2003. Recently, new observational mea...