Since the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope there has been widespread popular interest in astronomical imaging. A further series of events, most notably the recent Deep Impact mission have served to fuel further interest in this. In parallel with this there have been a number of events and trends that have increased interest in astronomical photography outside of professional astronomy. Adva...

Astronomers and telescope operators must make decisions about what to observe given limited telescope time. To optimize this decision-making process, we present a batch, cost-sensitive, active learning approach that exploits structure in the unlabeled dataset, accounts for label uncertainty, and minimizes annotation costs. We first cluster the unlabeled instances in feature space. We next intro...

When the Hubble Space Telescope was deployed from Space Shuttle Discovery on April 25, 1990, few knew just how far-reaching its impact would be on astronomy, cosmology, and public appreciation of the universe. “It has given us views of the universe that we have never seen before and provided a wealth of data for astronomers around the world to ponder,” says Ken Sembach, head of the Hubble Missi...

recording and understanding the stars and planets back thousands of years. But it was not until the early 17th century with the telescope’s invention that we recorded the first astronomical “images,” hand drawings of our Moon’s surfaces, the Sun, Venus, and Saturn, and Jupiter’s satellites. Detailed drawings by Galileo Galilei and others surpassed anything previously seen and were pivotal in ad...

Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN) has been used to transfer large volumes of radio astronomical data between the AUT Radio Astronomical Observatory at Warkworth, New Zealand and the international organisations with which we are collaborating and conducting observations. Here we report on the current status of connectivity and on the results of testing different data transfer ...

With the ever increasing level of automation of astronomical telescopes the benefits and feasibility of automated planning and scheduling are becoming more apparent. Improved efficiency and increased overall telescope utilization are the most obvious goals. Automated scheduling at some level has been done for several satellite observatories, but the requirements on these systems were much less ...

Kiwi Advanced Research and Education Network (KAREN) has been used to transfer large volumes of radio astronomical data between the Radio Astronomical Observatory at Warkworth, New Zealand and various international organizations involved in joint projects and VLBI observations. Here we report on the current status of connectivity and on the results of testing different data transfer protocols. ...

The fast growth of the wireless communication industry poses severe limitations on radio astronomical observations. This is largely due to the fact that in radio astronomy, in contrast to communication systems, the signals of interest are many orders of magnitude below the receiver noise power levels. The structure of some communication signals opens the possibility to reduce the effect on radi...

The technique of spectroastrometry (measuring the wavelength dependence of the position of an object) provides a means of studying the spatial structure of astronomical sources on scales much smaller than the seeing disk size or the diiraction limit. Despite successful demonstrations in the past, the method does not seem to be widely known. This paper describes techniques used at the Anglo-Aust...