After almost 5 years of operation, ESA’s International Gamma-Ray Astrophysics Laboratory (INTEGRAL) Space Observatory has unveiled a new soft Gamma ray sky and produced a remarkable harvest of results, ranging from identification of new high energy sources, to the discovery of dozens of variable sources to the mapping of the Aluminum emission from the Galaxy Plane to the presence of electrons a...

Cirrus cloud detection accuracy of GOSAT/CAI and Landsat-8 is evaluated with a ground based Laser Radar: Lidar data and sky view camera data. Also, the evaluation results are confirmed with Calipso data together with a topographic representation of vertical profile of cloud structure. Furthermore, origin of cirrus clouds is estimated with forward trajectory analysis. The results show that GOSAT...

Contrary to the story of the star-counter in Le Petit Prince, there aren’t unnumerable stars in the night sky, at least so far as we can see with our own eyes. Only about a thousand are visible. Almost all have names or Greek letter designations as part of constellations that anyone can learn to recognize. Modern astronomers have divided the sky into 88 constellations, many of them fictitious— ...

Measurements of cosmic microwave background (CMB) anisotropies by interferometers offer several advantages over single-dish observations. The formalism for analyzing interferometer CMB data is well developed in the flat-sky approximation, which is valid for small fields of view. As the area of sky is increased to obtain finer spectral resolution, this approximation needs to be relaxed. We exten...

Computer graphics recently have began being used for visual environmental assessment or architectural designs. Displaying the sky as a background is indispensable in generating photorealistic images for such applications. In this paper, we propose a fast display method of the sky color by expressing the intensity distribution of the sky using basis functions, even if the sun position and/or the...

The use of Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging), an active light-emitting instrument, is becoming increasingly common for a range of potential applications. Its ability to provide fine resolution spatial and vertical resolution elevation data makes it ideal for a wide range of studies. This paper demonstrates the capability of Lidar data to measure sky view factors (SVF). The Lidar data is used ...

The effect of the sky view factor (SVF) on outdoor thermal comfort has been extensively explored, while its impact indoor environment is ignored. This research combined Envi-met and kriging models to explore annual environment. Different from previous studies, this study explored temperature rather than temperature, perspective a full year instead typical summer day. analytical results reveal t...