The primary motivation for building neutrino telescopes is to open the road for neutrino astronomy, and to offer another observational window for the study of cosmic ray origins. Other physics topics, such as the search for WIMPs, can also be developed with neutrino telescope. As of March 2008, the IceCube detector, with half of its strings deployed, is the world largest neutrino telescope taki...

VERITAS is an atmospheric Cherenkov telescope array designed to study astrophysical sources of very-high-energy gamma radiation. Located in southern Arizona, USA, the array consists of four 12 m-diameter imaging Cherenkov telescopes. All four telescopes have been deployed at the basecamp of the Whipple Observatory and began full operation in early 2007. This paper describes the operational stat...

The ongoing development of large infrared array detectors has enabled wide field, deep surveys to be undertaken. There are, however, a number of challenges in building an infrared instrument which has both excellent optical quality and high sensitivity over a wide field. We discuss these problems in the context of building a wide field imaging camera for the 3.5m telescope at Calar Alto with th...

The 17 m diameter MAGIC telescope aims for gamma-ray astronomy above 15 GeV. The technical concept and status of the detector component developments for the first phase with a classical photomultiplier camera (threshold 30 GeV) will be given. The physics program will be reviewed in a separate contribution.

During recent years, bibliometric studies have become increasingly important in evaluating individual scientists, institutes, and entire observatories. In astronomy, often librarians are involved in maintaining publication databases and compiling statistics for their institutions. In this paper, we present a look behind the scenes to understand who is interested in bibliometric statistics, whic...

Following two months of very successful commissioning and the first science observations on the GBT (see the following articles), operation was suspended in early April, one month earlier than planned, to work on the azimuth track. As described in previous NRAO Newsletters, the azimuth track wear strips, on which the azimuth wheels roll, were shifting slightly in a circumferential direction as ...

detailed in Table 1. The washers are used to center and space lenses inside the eyepiece body. The washers provide a useful range of dimensions for accommodating different size lenses. The elastic rings are slightly oversized, and are used to snugly hold the optics inside the eyepiece body. The elastic rings (which can be inserted and removed) allow for fast design changes and quick experiments...

— We present the first optical observations of a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) afterglow using the 2-m robotic Liverpool Telescope (LT), which is owned and operated by Liverpool John Moores University and situated on La Palma. We briefly discuss the capabilities of LT and its suitability for rapid follow-up observations of early optical and infrared GRB light curves. In particular, the combination of a...

We adapt a non-linear filter proposed by Hu (2001) for detecting lensing of the CMB by large-scale structures to recover surface-density profiles of galaxy clusters from their localised, weak gravitational lensing effect on CMB fields. Shifting the band-pass of the filter to smaller scales, and normalising it such as to reproduce the convergence rather than the deflection angle, we find that th...

We present first results from the Southern Cosmology Survey, a new multiwavelength survey of the southern sky coordinated with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), a recently commissioned ground-based mm-band Cosmic Microwave Background experiment. This article presents a full analysis of archival optical multi-band imaging data covering an 8 square degree region near right ascension 23 hours...