Found 107 talks archived in Telescopes and instrumentation

For over 20 years, the Southeastern Association for Research in Astronomy (SARA) has operated a remotely-accessible 1-m-class telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona that has served as a focus for faculty and student research.  From its four charter institutional members, the SARA consortium has grown to include a dozen universities spanning Indiana to Florida.  In 2007, SARA assumed operations of a similar remotely-operated telescope at Cerro Tololo Interamerican Observatory in Chile.  SARA has most recently partnered with the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) to automate and assume operations of the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope (JKT) at the Roque des los Muchachos on La Palma.  This talk will provide a brief historical perspective on the SARA consortium as well as a summary of our facilities, research interests and prospects for the future.

In the past years, intensive Site Characterization campaigns have been performed to chose the sites for the future giant ELTs. Various atmospheric turbulence profilers with different resolution and sensed altitude ranges have been used, as well as climatological tools and satellite data analysis. Mixing long term statistics at low altitude resolution with high resolution data collected during short term campaigns allows to produce the reference profiles as input to the Adaptive Optics (AO) instrument performance estimators. In this talk I will perform a brief review of the principal and most used instruments and tools in order to give to the audience a panorama of the work and the efforts to monitor the atmospheric turbulence for astronomical purposes.

Adaptive optics systems rely on a real-time control system which is responsible for receiving wavefront sensor information and computing and applying the necessary correction to the deformable mirrors. Historically, real-time control systems have relied on customised hardware comprised of multiple FPGA and DSP systems, which high complexity. More recently it has been demonstrated that conventional PCs are now sufficiently powerful to to perform this task. In this talk, I will present an open-source real-time control system, DARC, discuss its implementation on the CANARY AO system at the William Herschel Telescope, and cover the algorithms available. Extension to ELT-scale operation will be discussed, including hardware and detector considerations. The internal architecture of this modular system will be presented, with a case being made for its suitability for implementation on any AO system type, on any telescope.

One of the challenges in solar astronomical observations is the lack of high resolution observations over a wide FOV. Adaptive optics (AO) systems, which are routinely used in current solar telescopes, can only provide successful correction over a narrow FOV. Multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) systems attempt to address this issue and provide correction over a much wider FOV. It will become a key technology in the next generation of solar telescopes, such as the EST and DKIST. At this time, there is no fully operational solar MCAO system in operation. Work is under way at several solar facilities like the NST (Ø1.6m, BBSO) and GREGOR (Ø1.5m, KIS) to build prototype solar MCAO
systems. There is also a significant investigative effort at the IAC to study the design and operation of a solar MCAO system (proper location of the DMs and WFS, appropriated sensing for an extended object,
communication between different WFS, convenient reconstruction method). This talk will provide a review of the current state of solar MCAO, concentrating on solar MCAO simulation efforts under development
at the National Solar Observatory.

I will discuss recent development in low noise amplifiers for astrophysical applications.
I will describe the fundamental quantum limits of linear amplifiers and then I will show how a
promising new class of amplifiers - superconducting parametric amplifiers - might be able to  (apparently) violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

ESO is an intergovernmental organization for astronomy founded in 1962 by five countries. It currently has 14 Member States in Europe with Brazil poised to join as soon as the Accession Agreement has been ratified. Together these countries represent approximately 30 percent of the world’s astronomers. ESO operates optical/infrared observatories on La Silla and Paranal in Chile, partners in the sub-millimeter radio observatories APEX and ALMA on Chajnantor and is about to start construction of the Extremely Large Telescope on Armazones.

La Silla hosts various robotic telescopes and experiments as well as the NTT and the venerable 3.6m telescope. The former had a key role in the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe and the latter hosts the ultra-stable spectrograph HARPS which is responsible for the discovery of nearly two-thirds of all confirmed exoplanets with masses below that of Neptune. On Paranal the four 8.2m units of the Very Large Telescope, the Interferometer and the survey telescopes VISTA and VST together constitute an integrated system which supports 16 powerful facility instruments, including adaptive-optics-assisted imagers and integral-field spectrographs, with half a dozen more on the way and the Extremely Large Telescope with its suite of instruments to be added to this system in about ten years time. Scientific highlights include the characterisation of the supermassive black hole in the Galactic Centre, the first image of an exoplanet, studies of gamma-ray bursts enabled by the Rapid Response Mode and milliarcsec imaging of evolved stars and active galactic nuclei. The single dish APEX antenna, equipped with spectrometers and wide-field cameras, contributes strongly to the study of high-redshift galaxies and of star- and planet-formation. Early Science results obtained with the ALMA interferometer already demonstrate its tremendous potential for observations of the cold Universe.

MUSE (Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer) is a 2nd generation Integral Field facility for the VLT. With a field of view of 1x1 arcmin, fine sampling, intermediate spectral resolution and large spectral coverage in the visible, it uses a complex image slicer, twenty-four parallel spectrographs and a large detector area. In addition, MUSE is conceived to work assisted by the Adaptive Optics Facility (AOF), which will enhance notably its performance. MUSE is the result of ten years of design and development by the MUSE consortium — headed by the Centre de Recherche Astrophysique de Lyon, France and the partner institutes Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP, Germany),  Institut für Astrophysik Göttingen (IAG, Germany),  Institute for Astronomy ETH Zurich (Switzerland), L'Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planétologie (IRAP, France), Nederlandse Onderzoekschool voor de Astronomie (NOVA, the Netherlands) and ESO.
MUSE has been successfully installed on ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT). In this talk it will be presented the instrument, its design and challenges, the integration (both in Europe and Paranal), the first light and first commissioning results.

The robotic 2m Liverpool Telescope, based on La Palma, is owned and
operated by Liverpool John Moores University. It has a diverse
instrument suite and a strong track record in time domain science,
with highlights including early time photometry and spectra of
supernovae, measurements of the polarization of gamma-ray burst
afterglows, and high cadence light curves of transiting extrasolar
planets. In the next decade the time domain will become an
increasingly prominent part of the astronomical agenda with the
arrival of new facilities such as LSST, SKA, CTA, Gaia and the next
generation of exoplanet finders. Additionally, detections of
astrophysical gravitational wave and neutrino sources opening new
windows on the transient universe. To capitalise on this exciting new
era we intend to build Liverpool Telescope 2: a new robotic facility
on La Palma dedicated to time domain science. The next generation of
survey facilities will discover large numbers of variable and
transient objects, but there will be a pressing need for follow-up
observations for scientific exploitation, in particular spectroscopic
follow-up. Liverpool Telescope 2 will have a 4 metre aperture,
enabling optical/infrared spectroscopy of faint objects. Robotic
telescopes are capable of rapid reaction to unpredictable phenomena,
and for fast-fading transients like gamma-ray burst afterglows, this
rapid reaction enables observations which would be impossible on less
agile telescopes of much larger aperture. We intend Liverpool
Telescope 2 to have a world-leading response time, with the aim that
we will be taking data with a few tens of seconds of receipt of a
trigger from a ground- or space-based transient detection facility. In
this talk I will discuss the role for Liverpool Telescope 2 in the
2020+ astronomical landscape, the key science topics we hope to
address, and the results of our preliminary optical design studies.

Se revisará el estado de los instrumentos instalados en los telescopios del Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos (ORM) y del Observatorio del Teide (OT). Se hará una breve introducción para hablar sobre las diferentes maneras de acceder a tiempo de telescopio (anuncios de oportunidad normales, noches de servicio y DDT). El objetivo de esta charla es ayudar a preparar propuestas de observación para el semestre 14A. Habrá tiempo para preguntas y comentarios.

CanariCam is the GTC multi-mode mid-IR camera developed by the University of Florida. CanariCam commissioning began in earnest in
 mid-2012, and is still in progress. However, during that time it was also possible to begin science observations. After commenting on
 the current status of CanariCam, I will present some highlights of these early science observations, with an emphasis on those of protoplanetary disks. These data are still being analyzed and interpreted, so my comments will be preliminary. However, they demonstrate that CanariCam is an outstanding instrument that can provide valuable insight into a variety of astrophysical processes. CanariCam's polarimetric mode is particularly unique, and I will show intriguing science results that may indicate the magnetic-field distribution
in a YSO outflow and in massive disks and their environments. I am presenting these results on behalf of the CanariCam Science Team, many of whom have contributed significantly to the early progress with CanariCam.