We compare a range of powerful compression methods – fractal, wavelets, pyramidal median, JPEG – with compression tools dedicated to astronomy such as HCOMPRESS, FITSPRESS and Mathematical Morphology, and apply these to astronomical images. Quality is quantified from visual appearance, and from photometric and astrometric measurements. Computational requirements of each method are discussed. We...

Annotation Modern astronomy undergoes a big change due to a new possibilities enabled by technology development. Large scale survey projects produce huge amount of data, which needs to be processed and organized in databases to provide access by astronomical community. There are many problems in the current state of art of accessing large astronomical databases and organizing programmatic acces...

Teaching and learning astronomy is known to be both exciting and challenging. To learn astronomy demands not only disciplinary knowledge, but also ability to discern affordances from disciplinary specific representations used within the discourse, which we call disciplinary discernment, and ability to think spatially, which we refer to as extrapolating three-dimensionality from a two dimensiona...

Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs) are generally very faint and cannot in practice be monitored with a well-sampled long-term light curve; so our discovery of the bright KBO 2000 EB173 offers an excellent opportunity for synoptic studies. We present a well-sampled photometric time series (77 R magnitudes and 29 V magnitudes on 78 nights) over a 225-day time span centered on the 2001 opposition. The lig...

The frequency shift of spectral lines from astronomical objects is most often explained by the Doppler Effect arising in relative motion and the broadening of a particular line is supposed to depend on the absolute temperature , pressure or the different line of sight velocities.. The Wolf effect on the other hand deals with correlation induced spectral changes and explains both the broadening ...