JMaCS is software intended to facilitate, in soft realtime, the local or remote interactive and programmatic monitoring and control of some distributed target, such as an astronomical telescope or telescope network. It is derived from experimental software written for a radar used for observing the Earth's ionosphere, and aims to bring to bear the remote polymorphism afforded by Java RMI (Remot...

The next generation of adaptive optics systems will require tomographic reconstruction techniques to map the optical refractive index fluctuations, generated by the atmospheric turbulence, along the line of sight to the astronomical target. These systems can be enhanced with data from an external atmospheric profiler. This is important for Extremely Large Telescope scale tomography. Here we pro...

The proposed Low Frequency Array will be a powerful new radio telescope operating in the 15 to 240 MHz range. LOFAR will be a fully digital instrument with tens of thousands of antennas and receivers. In the currently proposed configuration LOFAR will also be capable of operating as a high performance passive radar system using FM radio stations as signals of opportunity. In this mode of operat...

We present an improved technique for imaging through turbulence at visible wavelengths using a rotation shearing pupil-plane interferometer, intended for astronomical and terrestrial imaging applications. While previous astronomical rotation shearing interferometers have made only visibility modulus measurements, this interferometer makes four simultaneous measurements on each interferometric b...

The widespread use of the internet has enabled complex instrumentation to be available remotely and made it possible for students to use facilities to which they might otherwise not have access. Internet access to radio astronomical observatories, including the 37 m radio telescope at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Haystack Observatory, has opened up new possibilities for undergradua...

Observations were made of the optical afterglow of GRB020813 (Fox, Blake & Price, 2002) with the KISO observatory 1.05 m Schmidt telescope and the Bisei astronomical observatory 1.01 m telescope. Four-band (B, V, R, and I) photometric data points were obtained from 2002, August 13 10:52 to 16:46 UT, or 0.346−0.516 days after the burst. In order to investigate the early-time (<1 day) evolution o...

We present the first data release of the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), an ambitious spectroscopic survey to measure radial velocities and stellar atmosphere parameters (temperature, metallicity, surface gravity) of up to one million stars using the 6dF multi-object spectrograph on the 1.2-m UK Schmidt Telescope of the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO). The RAVE program started in 2003, ob...

This paper describes the S PIKE system, a general framework for scheduling which has been developed by the Space Telescope Science Institute for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (HST). Efficient use of astronomical observatories is very important to the scientific community: the demand for research-grade telescopes far exceeds the supply. The need for efficient scheduling is especially keen for sp...

The angular resolution of ground-based optical telescopes is limited by the degrading effects of the turbulent atmosphere. In the absence of an atmosphere, the angular resolution of a typical telescope is limited only by diffraction, i.e., the wavelength of interest, λ, divided by the size of its primary mirror's aperture, D. For example, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), with a 2.4-m primary m...

We present a very deep near-infrared spectroscopic observation of a strong Lyα emitter at z = 6.33, SDF J132440.6+273607, which we used to search for Heiiλ1640. This emission line is expected if the target hosts a significant number of population III stars. Even after 42 ksec of integration with the Subaru/OHS spectrograph, no emission-line features are detected in the JH band, which confirms t...