We have designed, constructed, and put into operation a very large area CCD camera that covers the field of view of the 1.2 m Samuel Oschin Schmidt Telescope at the Palomar Observatory. The camera consists of 112 CCDs arranged in a mosaic of four rows with 28 CCDs each. The CCDs are pixel Sarnoff 600 # 2400 thinned, back-illuminated devices with pixels. The camera covers an area of on the 13 mm...

Contemporary imaging air Cherenkov telescopes (IACT) for ground-based very high energy (VHE) gamma ray astronomy have prime focus optical design. Typically these telescopes have a (2−4)◦ wide field of view (FoV). They use f/0.7−f/1.2 optics and provide (3−10) ′ resolution in the FoV. Generally, a well designed telescope that includes more than one optical element will offer some advantages not ...

Stellar image matching allows to verify if a given pair of images belongs to the same stellar object/area, or knowing that they correspond to the same sky area, to verify if there are some changes between them due to an stellar event (supernova event, changes in the object position, etc). Some applications are stellar photometry, telescope tracking and pointing, robot telescopes, and sky monito...

n the American West throughout the latter part of the 19th century, the conquest of the frontier by American industrial culture led to a profound sense of loss among conservation-minded individuals. They mourned the passing of a way of life and of an unspoiled grand landscape that fostered individual freedoms, simple rewards for hard work, and an intimacy with the land that was required for mer...

Contemporary imaging air Cherenkov telescopes (IACT) for ground-based very high energy (VHE) gamma-ray astronomy have prime focus optical design. Typically these telescopes have a (2−4) wide field of view (FoV). They use F/0.7-F/1.2 optics and provide (3−10) ′ resolution in the FoV. Generally, a well designed telescope that includes more than one optical element will offer some advantages not a...

Several techniques exist to select and materialize a proper set of data in a suitable structure that manage the queries submitted to the online analytical processing systems. These techniques are called view management techniques, which consist of three research areas: 1) view selection to materialize, 2) query processing and rewriting using the materialized views, and 3) maintaining materializ...

Urban overheating significantly affects people’s physical and mental health. The addition of street trees is an essential, economical, effective means by which to mitigate urban heat optimize the overall thermal environment. Focusing on typical canyon clusters in Harbin, China, landscape morphology was quantified streetscape interface measurements (sky view factor, tree building factor). Throug...

MAGIC is a single-dish Cherenkov telescope located on La Palma (Spain), hence with an optimal view on the Northern sky. Sensitive in the 30 GeV – 30 TeV energy band, it is nowadays the only ground-based instrument being able to measure high-energy γ-rays below 100 GeV. We review the most recent experimental results on Galactic sources obtained using MAGIC. These include pulsars, binary systems,...

The U.S. Naval Observatory Robotic Astrometric Telescope (URAT) project aims at a highly accurate (5 mas), ground-based, all-sky survey. Requirements are presented for the optics and telescope for this 0.85 m aperture, 4.5 degree diameter field-of-view, specialized instrument, which are close to the capability of the industry. The history of the design process is presented as well as astrometri...

This paper offers a new point of view on component separation, based on a model of additive components which enjoys a much greater flexibility than more traditional linear component models. This flexibility is needed to process the complex full-sky observations expected from the Planck space mission, for which it was developed, but it may also be useful in any context where accurate component s...