An important innovation in the geosciences is the astronomical time scale. The astronomical time scale is based on the Milankovitch-forced stratigraphy that has been calibrated to astronomical models of paleoclimate forcing; it is defined for much of Cenozoic-Mesozoic. For the Palaeozoic era, however, astronomical forcing has not been widely explored because of lack of high-precision geochronol...

We apply a total variation minimization technique for the deblurring of two-dimensional images. This yields an integro-diierential equation with a nonlinear elliptic partial diierential operator. In this paper we discuss a numerical scheme for the eecient solution of this integro-diierential equation. Results are presented for a deconvolution problem arising in ground-based astronomical imaging.

In this paper we report an experiment that investigated the question of whether elementary school children have metaconceptual awareness of theory revision processes. Fiftytwo elementary school children (grades, 1, 3 and 5) were asked to select between phenomenological and scientific depictions of different astronomical phenomena and indicate which of these depictions were closer to “Reality” a...

Abstract Data archiving is one of the most critical issues for modern astronomical observations. With development a new generation radio telescopes, transfer and massive remote data have become urgent problems to be solved. Herein, we present practical robust file-level flow-control approach, called Unlimited Sliding-Window (USW), by referring classic method in TCP protocol. Based on USW Next G...

Gravitational microlensing is a new technique that allows low-mass exoplanets to be detected at large distances of ~7kpc. This paper briefly outlines the principles of the method and describes the observational techniques. It shows that small (e.g. 0.35m) telescopes with a CCD camera can make unexpectedly useful observations of these events. © 2005 Society for Astronomical Science.

Classical adaptive optics (AO) is now a widespread technique for high-resolution imaging with astronomical ground-based telescopes. It generally uses simple and efficient control algorithms. Multiconjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) is a more recent and very promising technique that should extend the corrected field of view. This technique has not yet been experimentally validated, but simulations ...

The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will catalog billions of astronomical objects and trillions of sources, all of which will be stored and managed by a database management system. One of the main challenges is real-time alert generation. To generate alerts, up to 100K new difference detections have to be cross-correlated with the huge historical catalogs, and then further processed to p...

Superlevel partitioning is combined with a simple relaxation procedure to construct an iterative technique for solving equations of statistical equilibrium. In treating an N -level model atom, the technique avoids the N scaling in computer time for direct solutions with standard linear equation routines and also does not fail at large N due to the accumulation of round-off errors. In consequenc...

The Moon is the closest astronomical object to the Earth, and the only one on which we can see significant surface features with our naked eyes (the Sun is too bright, and everything else is pointlike or, like the Andromeda galaxy, too dim). As a result, it has from time immemorial inspired many fanciful notions, including that the Moon is inhabited. In fact, life on the Moon was the subject of...