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Full-Text Articles in Astrophysics and Astronomy
Updating And Revising Star Camera For Future Flights Of Balloon Borne Experiment, Krystle N. Sy, Seth Hillbrand
Updating And Revising Star Camera For Future Flights Of Balloon Borne Experiment, Krystle N. Sy, Seth Hillbrand
STAR Program Research Presentations
The BLAST (Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope) experiment surveys the galaxy from altitudes of 100,000 ft in order to answer important cosmological questions, such as how stars are formed. This experiment is conducted above Antarctica to minimize unwanted noise. Two star cameras are used in the navigation systems to identify known stars. The cameras take pictures and match stars in the image to known star positions from a catalog stored in the star camera's computer. This is done using code written in C++, a computer programming language. In order to modernize the system, the code needs to be updated. A …
Analyzing The Performance Of The Sofia Infrared Telescope, Sarah M. Bass, Jeffrey Van Cleve, Zaheer Ali
Analyzing The Performance Of The Sofia Infrared Telescope, Sarah M. Bass, Jeffrey Van Cleve, Zaheer Ali
STAR Program Research Presentations
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is an airborne near-space observatory onboard a modified Boeing 747-SP aircraft, which flies at altitudes of 45,000 ft., above 99% of the Earth’s water vapor. SOFIA contains an effective 2.5 m infrared (IR) telescope that has a dichroic tertiary mirror, reflecting IR and visible wavelengths to the science instrument (SI) and focal plane imager (FPI), respectively. To date, seven different SIs have been designed to cover a wide range of wavelengths and spectral resolutions. Since the telescope operates in the infrared, different techniques, including chopping, nodding, and dithering, are used to reduce the …
Flitecam Data Process Validation, Jesse K. Tsai, Sachindev S. Shenoy, Brent Cedric Nicklas, Zaheer Ali, William T. Reach
Flitecam Data Process Validation, Jesse K. Tsai, Sachindev S. Shenoy, Brent Cedric Nicklas, Zaheer Ali, William T. Reach
STAR Program Research Presentations
FLITECAM Data Processing Validation
Many of the challenges that come from working with astronomical imaging arise from the reduction of raw data into scientifically meaningful data. First Light Infrared Test CAMera (FLITECAM) is an infrared camera operating in the 1.0–5.5 μm waveband on board SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy). Due to the significant noise from the atmosphere and the camera itself, astronomers have developed many methods to reduce the effects of atmospheric and instrumental emission. The FLITECAM Data Reduction Program (FDRP) is a program, developed at SOFIA Science Center, subtracts darks, removes flats, and dithers images.
This project contains …
The Implementation Of The Shear Correlation Function And The Matter Power Spectrum In R, Allison A. Scheppelmann, Deborah J. Bard
The Implementation Of The Shear Correlation Function And The Matter Power Spectrum In R, Allison A. Scheppelmann, Deborah J. Bard
STAR Program Research Presentations
Weak gravitational lensing is an important tool in understanding the large-scale structure of the universe. One component in understanding the effect of weak gravitational lensing is the shear correlation function and matter power spectrum. The calculation of these values is often complicated and time consuming. In order to decrease the cost of these calculations they were implemented in R using parallelization. This resulted in the calculations completing faster and the process to be easily changed in order to fit the need of each researcher using the algorithms created in R.