Dome A is the highest point on the Antarctic Plateau, and the Chinese Expedition Team first arrived here in 2005 January. It is an excellent site for astronomical observations. The first-generation Chinese Antarctic optical telescope CSTAR has been operating on Dome A since 2008 January. The second-generation Chinese telescopes known as the Three Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3) are currently...

We propose to process and combine with state-of-the-art tools the majority of the WFPC2 images obtained as part of Archival Pure Parallel Program, consisting of observations of over 3,000 random pointings primarily in the wide WFPC2 UBV I filters. We will produce combined and cosmic-ray cleaned images, as well as object catalogs, for over 2,000 of these pointings. We will use these data to addr...

In almost 30 years of operation, the Very Large Array (VLA) has proved to be a remarkably flexible and productive radio telescope. However, the basic capabilities of the VLA have changed little since it was designed. A major expansion utilizing modern technology is currently underway to improve the capabilities of the VLA by at least an order of magnitude in both sensitivity and in frequency co...

Timon Screech. The Shogun’s Silver Telescope. God, Art, and Money in the English Quest for Japan, 1600-1625. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2020, 336 p. ISBN: 978-01-988-3203-4. 44, 91 €
 Yulia Frumer. Making Time. Astronomical Time Measurement Tokugawa Japan. Chicago: of Chicago 2018, 290 978-0-226-51644-8. 47,99 €

SciQL (pronounced as ‘cycle’) is a novel SQL-based array query language for scientific applications with both tables and arrays as first class citizens. SciQL lowers the entrance fee of adopting relational DBMS (RDBMS) in scientific domains, because it includes functionality often only found in mathematics software packages. In this paper, we demonstrate the usefulness of SciQL for astronomical...

ASTRON is building the world’s largest radio telescope for low frequencies, LOFAR. LOFAR is optimized for detecting astronomical signals in the 30-80 MHz and 120-240 MHz frequency windows. Since this part of the spectrum is in extensive use by others, a special RFI mitigation strategy is implemented which will be described in the paper. International RFI measurements will be presented and we wi...

VLBI at millimeter wavelengths (mm-VLBI) allows the detailed imaging of compact galactic and extragalactic radio sources with micro-arcsecond scale resolution, unaccessible by other observing techniques. Here we discuss the scientific potential of mm-VLBI for present and future research on 'Active Galactic Nuclei' (AGN) and their powerful relativistic jets. With the new generation of large radi...

SPIRE, the Spectral and Photometric Imaging REceiver, is the Herschel Space Observatory’s submillimetre camera and spectrometer. It contains a three-band imaging photometer operating at 250, 350 and 500 μm, and an imaging Fourier-transform spectrometer (FTS) covering 194−671 μm (447−1550 GHz). In this paper we describe the initial approach taken to the absolute calibration of the SPIRE instrume...