Found 111 talks archived in Telescopes and instrumentation

In collaboration with member states institutes, the use of the synergies with ESO is producing first important results in the R&D for Laser Guide Star adaptive optics, to be used for the large and extremely large telescope projects.

In this talk we will report on the preliminary results of the current campaign on LGS return flux with laser guide stars at Observatorio de el Teide and the foreseen tests of the EELT LGS-AO scheme, to be done at the WHT starting in summer 2016. An outlook will be given on the proposal for further feasibility tests at WHT in 2018-19, to experiment novel LGS-AO schemes using uplink beam correction and pyramid wavefront sensing. The demonstration is for a LGS-AO scheme giving high Strehl on the EELT and adaptive optics in the visible on 8m class telescopes.

The Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre (hereafter OAJ) is a new Spanish astronomical facility devoted to carry out large sky multi-filter surveys with two telescopes of large field-of-view (FoV): the Javalambre Survey Telescope (JST), a 2.5m with 3deg FoV, and the Javalambre Auxiliary Survey Telescope (JAST), an 80cm with 2deg FoV. Both telescopes are equipped with panoramic cameras that amount to 1.3Gpix and are able to host more than 80 different filters simultaneously. During the first years of operation, the OAJ will be mostly devoted to conduct the Javalambre Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey (J-PAS) and the Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS). J-PAS will observe 8.500deg2 of the sky visible from Javalambre with a set of 54 narrow-band contiguous optical filters plus 5 broader ones, performing in the end as a low resolution IFU of the Northern hemisphere. It will provide unprecedented spectral energy distributions for every pixel of the sky, and ultimately for more than 200 million galaxies. J-PLUS is now beginning to observe the same sky area of J-PAS with 12 narrow, intermediate and broad-band filters aimed to provide the photometric calibration of J-PAS and unprecedented multicolor data for many fields of the Astrophysics. Both J-PAS and J-PLUS will provide powerful 3D views of the Universe that will be made publicly available to the community as legacy projects. In this talk I will present the OAJ and the J-PAS and J-PLUS projects, describing the survey strategies and their main scientific objectives and capabilities.

ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, was formally dedicated on March 13, 2013. After an overview of the highlights of ALMA: Science drivers, characteristic parameters and observing modes, I will discuss some of the of the tools available to obtain images and spectra from the observations  --those you might propose and those already in the data archive. I will present a real-time demonstration of a quite generic reduction of an actual ALMA dataset obtained from the public archive, starting from the (ASDM) raw data to produce good quality, publishable images with a dynamic range that reaches ~1800 (on the strongest calibrator); although still limited by systematic effects.

CARMENES may find the first uncontrovertible exoearth in the habitable zone of a star in the solar neighbourhood. Its acronym, 'Calar Alto high-Resolution search for M dwarfs with Exoearths with Near-infrared and optical Échelle Spectrographs', is long but self-explanatory. After six years of hard design and construction, CARMENES is currently being commissioned at the German-Spanish 3.5 m Calar Alto telescope in Almería. Well in advance of its American, Japanese and Canadian-French competitors, it will be in January 2016 the first and only ultra-stable high-resolution spectrograph covering the red optical and near-infrared. As its co-project manager, I will give a summary of the homonymous CARMENES instrument, the international consortium that has built it, the on-going on-sky commissioning, and the science project that will be carried with it during guaranteed time observations.

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.