FEROS is a fiber-fed bench-mounted prism-crossdispersed echelle spectrograph for the ESO 1.52-m telescope at La Silla. It works in quasi Littrow mode and in white pupil configuration. For the object and the nearby sky, the complete optical spectrum from 370–860 nm is recorded in one exposure with a resolving power of R = 48,000 by the use of a two-beam, two-slice image slicer. A first concept o...

Abstract. TOPCAT is a widely used desktop application for manipulation of astronomical catalogues and other tables, which has long provided fast interactive visualisation features including 1, 2 and 3-d plots, multiple datasets, linked views, color coding, transparency and more. In Version 4 a new plotting library has been written from scratch to deliver new and enhanced visualisation capabilit...

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...

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...

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...

The velocity information of spacecraft can be directly obtained by the autonomous navigation method based on astronomical spectral measurement. It provides complete direct measurement for traditional methods represented angle and ranging, which is great significance high precision navigation. This paper comprehensively introduces principle measurement, as well technical realization solar atomic...

The optical design for an Infrared Multiple Object Spectrometer (IRMOS) intended for Astronomical research is presented. To accomplish spectroscopy of multiple objects simultaneous, IRMOS utilizes a Micro-Mirror array (MMA) as an electronically controlled slit device. This approach makes object selection simple and offers great versatility for performing spectral analysis on many objects within...

In this article we present the Data Flow System (DFS) for the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). The Data Flow System is the VLT end-to-end software system for handling astronomical observations from the initial observation proposal phase through the acquisition, processing and control of the astronomical data. The Data Flow System was first installed for VLTI first fringes utilising t...

Received ; accepted – 2 – ABSTRACT We describe the design, operation, and performance of a new high-speed infrared photometer using the Solid-State Photomultiplier (SSPM) detector. single-photon counting capability over the 0.4-28 micron wavelength range, intrinsic time response of order 1 ns, and low detector noise (Petroff, et al., 1987). We have operated a 200x200-micron back-illuminated SSP...

Radio astronomical observations have very poor signal to noise ratios, unlike in other disciplines. On the other hand, it is possible to observe the object of interest for long time intervals as well as using a wider bandwidth. Traditionally, by averaging in time and in frequency, it has been possible to improve the signal to noise ratio of astronomical observations to improve the dynamic range...