This book reproduces the proceedings of the last of a series of "Euroconferences" dedicated to the ongoing near-infrared sky surveys DENIS and 2MASS. It presents the current status of both projects and some of the most outstanding results they have recently achieved in various areas of galactic and extragalactic astronomy. The book contains substantial articles by researchers directly involved in the survey data processing and interpretation which thoroughly describe the astrophysical context in which deep and homogeneous near-infrared surveys will eventually bring about significant breakthrough. They deal with the determination of basic parameters of the galactic structure, the stellar content of the bulge, the construction of unbiased and statistically significant samples of isolated very low mass stars and brown dwarfs, the improvement of the low-end of the stellar luminosity and mass functions, the complete census of young stellar objects in nearby giant molecular clouds, the accurate determination of the luminosity function of late-type giants in the Magellanic Clouds and the structure of the local universe. The analysis of a very small subsample of the full expected set of data promises an extraordinary harvest of discoveries in the 21st century, especially when these data are merged with the results of major related space missions such as Hipparcos and ISO. This book would be of general interest to graduate students in astronomy and professional astronomers involved in most areas of observational astronomy.

Radio techniques were the nrst to lead astronomy away from the quiescent and limited Universe revealed by traditional observations at optical wave lengths. In the earliest days of radio astronomy, a handful of radio physicists and engineers made one startling discovery after another as they opened up the radio sky. With this collection of classic papers and the extensive intro ductory material, the reader can experience these exciting discoveries, as well as understand the developing techniques and follow the motivations which prompted the various lines of inquiry. For instance he or she will follow in detail the several attempts to detect radio waves from the sun at the turn of the century; the unravelling by Jansky of a "steady hiss type static"; the incredible story of Reber who built a 9 meter dish in his backyard in 1937 and then mapped the Milky Way; the vital discoveries by Hey and colleagues of radio bursts from the Sun and of a discrete source in the constellation of Cygnus; the development of receivers and interferometry in the post-war years by the groups led by Ryle in Cambridge and Pawsey in Sydney; the nrst measurements and exciting identiftcations of Taurus A (the Crab Nebula), Centaurus A, Virgo A, Cassiopeia A, and Cygnus A, the last opening the neld of radio cosmology; the early development of synchroton theory; and the prediction and discovery seven years later of the 21 cm line of neutral hy drogen."

th The 4 ESO CCO Workshop, Optical Detectors for Astronomy, was held during September 13-16, 1999 at its usual location, the headquarters of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. We prefer to remember this workshop as a "meeting of friends," who came to Garching to visit ESO and to present their work, rather than a formal meeting. Based on our experience with the 1996 ESO CCO workshop, we deliberately put emphasis on creating an environment that encouraged the participants to stay together and informally exchange ideas. These informal events began with a tour of the BWM auto factory and continued with a reception at "SchloB Beletic," the conference dinner at a real SchloB of the Bavarian International School (where the participants enjoyed basket, baseball, table soccer, rock climbing and eventually dancing) and concluded with a tour of the Paulaner Brewery and dinner at the Seehaus in the Englisher Garten. The lunch "Biergarten," adjacent to the poster session area, was a daily meeting point. The result was a good mixture of excellent presentations and posters, collected in these Proceedings, and many occasions for people to get in touch and to have fun together, as witnessed by the selection of workshop pictures that we randomly placed between papers. This book contains a special contribution.

Many new tests of gravity and, in particular, of Einstein's general relativity theory will be carried out in the near future: The Lense--Thirring effect and the equivalence principle will be tested in space; moreover, gravitational waves will be detected, and new atomic interferometers and clocks will be built for measurements in gravitational and inertial fields. New high-precision devices have made these experiments feasible. They will contribute to a better understanding of gravitational physics. Both experimental developments and the theoretical concepts are collected in this volume. Exhaustive reviews give an overall insight into the subject of experimental gravitation.

Celestial fundamental catalogues are a prerequisite for the determination of absolute positions and motions in space. Presently, positional astrometry is at the watershed between classical fundamental catalogues, based on moving reference stars, and modern catalogues, based on extragalactic reference objects with non-measurable motion. This book addresses the concepts and methods of the respective construction techniques leading to the stellar frame of the FK5 (fifth fundamental catalogue) and to the newly adopted extragalactic radio reference frame, ICRF (international celestial reference frame), with its extension to optical wavelengths by the Hipparcos Catalogue. While principal outlines of meridian circle observations are given, emphasis is put in some detail on the VLBI technique as applied to astrometry, and to the observational techniques used in the Hipparcos mission, including the tie of the originally non-anchored rigid Hipparcos sphere into the ICRF.

The 2005 meeting in Taormina, Italy was attended by 127 professionals who develop and use the highest quality detectors for wavelengths from x-ray to sub-mm, with emphasis on optical and infrared detectors. The meeting consisted of overview talks, technical presentations, poster sessions and roundtable discussions. These proceedings capture the technical content and the spirit of the 2005 workshop. The 87 papers cover a wide range of detector technologies including CCDs, CMOS, APDs, and sub-mm detectors. There are papers on observatory status and plans, special applications, detector testing and characterization, and electronics. A special feature of these proceedings is the inclusion of pedagogical overview papers, which were written by teams of leading experts from different institutions. These proceedings are appropriate for a range of expertise levels, from undergraduates to professionals working in the field. The information presented in this book will serve as a valuable reference for many years to come. This workshop was organized by the Scientific Workshop Factory, Inc. and the INAF- Osservatorio Astrofisico di Catania.

This volume consists of invited lectures and seminars presented at the NATO Advanced Study Institute "The Gamma Ray Sky with COMPTON GRO and SIGMA," which was held at the Centre de Physique Theorique of Les Houches (France) in January / February 1994. The school has been planned by a Scientific Organizing Committee. It was organized with the aim of providing students and young researchers with an up-to-date account of the high-energy phenomena in the vicinity of compact objets and the diffuse gamma-ray backgrounds after the early results from the gamma-ray telescope SIGMA and the four instruments onboard COMPTON GRO (Gamma Ray Observatory): BATSE (Burst and Transient Source Experiment), COMPTEL(Compto'l Telescope), EGRET (Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope) and OS SE(Oriented Scintillation Spectrometer Experiment) . It was attended by more than sixty researchers from many countries. The lectures and seminars represent a complete coverage of our present knowledge and understanding of: Gamma-ray backgrounds, Gamma-ray Burts, Active Galactic Nuclei, Galactic Compact Objects, Gamma-ray Spectroscopy, Instrumentation and observation techniques, etc ... Most of these lectures are reproduced in this volume. Unfortunately, a few lecturers have chosen not to submit their manuscript.

Line intensity mapping (LIM) is an observational technique that probes the large-scale structure of the Universe by collecting light from a wide field of the sky. This book demonstrates a novel analysis method for LIM using machine learning (ML) technologies. The author develops a conditional generative adversarial network that separates designated emission signals from sources at different epochs. It thus provides, for the first time, an efficient way to extract signals from LIM data with foreground noise. The method is complementary to conventional statistical methods such as cross-correlation analysis. When applied to three-dimensional LIM data with wavelength information, high reproducibility is achieved under realistic conditions. The book further investigates how the trained machine extracts the signals, and discusses the limitation of the ML methods. Lastly an application of the LIM data to a study of cosmic reionization is presented. This book benefits students and researchers who are interested in using machine learning to multi-dimensional data not only in astronomy but also in general applications.

Astronomy on the Personal Computer provides the reader with a thorough introduction to the computation of celestial mechanics, which is of particular significance to astronomical observation. Covering everything from astronomical and computational theory to the construction of rapid and accurate applications programs, this book supplies the necessary knowledge and software solutions for determining and predicting the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets, minor planets and comets, solar eclipses, stellar occultations by the Moon, phases of the Moon and much more. This completely revised edition makes use of the widely implemented programming language C++, and individual applications may be efficiently realized through the use of a powerful module library. The accompanying CD-ROM contains, in addition to the complete, fully documented and commented source codes, the executable programs for use with the Windows 95/98/NT and Linux operating systems.

Thisbookpresentsmaterialwhichismorealgorithmicallyorientedthanmost alternatives.Italsodealswithtopicsthatareatorbeyondthestateoftheart. Examples include practical and applicable wavelet and other multiresolution transform analysis. New areas are broached like the ridgelet and curvelet transforms. The reader will ?nd in this book an engineering approach to the interpretation of scienti?c data. Compared to the 1st Edition, various additions have been made throu- out, and the topics covered have been updated. The background or en- ronment of this book's topics include continuing interest in e-science and the virtual observatory, which are based on web based and increasingly web service based science and engineering. Additional colleagues whom we would like to acknowledge in this 2nd edition include: Bedros Afeyan, Nabila Aghanim, Emmanuel Cand' es, David Donoho, Jalal Fadili, and Sandrine Pires, We would like to particularly - knowledge Olivier Forni who contributed to the discussion on compression of hyperspectral data, Yassir Moudden on multiwavelength data analysis and Vicent Mart' ?nez on the genus function. The cover image to this 2nd edition is from the Deep Impact project. It was taken approximately 8 minutes after impact on 4 July 2005 with the CLEAR6 ?lter and deconvolved using the Richardson-Lucy method. We thank Don Lindler, Ivo Busko, Mike A'Hearn and the Deep Impact team for the processing of this image and for providing it to us.

This book contains a selection of refereed papers presented at the 6 Specialist Meeting on Microwave Radiometry and Remote Sensing of the Environment held in Florence, Italy on March 15-18, 1999.
Over the last two decades, passive microwave remote sensing has made considerable progress, and has achieved significant results in the study of the Earth's surface and atmosphere. Many years of observations with ground-based and satellite-borne sensors have made an important contribution to improving our knowledge of many geophysical processes of the Earth's environment and of global changes. The evolution in microwave radiometers aboard satellites has increased steadily over recent years. At the same time, many investigations have been carried out both to improve the algorithms for the retrieval of geophysical parameters and to develop new technologies.
The book is divided into four main sections: three of these are devoted to the observation of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, and the fourth, to future missions and new technologies. The first section deals with the study of sea and land surfaces, and reports recent advances in remote sensing of ocean wind, sea ice, soil moisture and vegetation biomass, including electromagnetic modelling and the assimilation of radiometric data in models of land surface processes. The following two sections are devoted to the measurement of atmospheric quantities which are of fundamental importance in climatology and meteorology, and, since they influence radio-wave propagation, they also impact on several other fields, including geodesy, navigational satellite and radioastronomy. The last section presents an overview of new technologies and plansfor future missions.

The ideal gift for all amateur and seasoned astronomers. This is the ideal resource for beginners and experienced stargazers in the United States and Canada, and has been updated to include new and practical information covering events occurring in North America's night sky throughout 2024. This practical guide is both an easy introduction to astronomy and a useful reference for seasoned stargazers. Now includes a section on comets and a map of the moon. Designed specifically for North America. Written and illustrated by astronomical experts, Storm Dunlop and Wil Tirion, and approved by the astronomers of the Royal Observatory Greenwich. Content includes: Advice on where to start looking. Easy-to-use star maps for each month with descriptions of what to see. Positions of the moon and visible planets. Details of objects and events in 2024. Now in three editions: Britain and Ireland; North America; Southern Hemisphere.

Seeing Stars is written for astronomers, regardless of the depth of their theoretical knowledge, who are taking their first steps in observational astronomy. Chris Kitchin and Bob Forrest - both professional astronomers - take a conducted tour of the night sky and suggest suitable observing programmes for everyone from beginners to experts. How is this book different? We are all familiar with the beautiful images of planets and galaxies obtained by spacecraft and giant telescopes - but what can you really see with a small telescope? What should you expect from a small refractor or reflector? And what is the effect of observing from a site near a city? The answers are all here, with many photographs that will illustrate exactly what can be seen with different instruments (everything from the naked eye to a 300mm telescope) - and from different locations.

The 1990s are proving to be a very exciting p&iod for high angular resolution astronomy. At radio wavelengths a combination of new array instruments and pow erful imaging algorithms have generated images of unprecedented resolution and quality. In the optical and infrared, the great technical difficulties associated with constructing separated-aperture interferometers have been largely overcome, and many new instruments are now operating or are being developed. As these pro grams start to produce observational results they will be able to draw extensively on the experience gained by the radio-interferometry community. Thus it seemed that the time was ripe for a meeting which would bring together workers from all wavelength ranges to discuss the details of the science and art of "Very High Angular Resolution Imaging" . While the main emphasis of Symposium No. 158 was on high resolution tech niques from the radio, mm-wave, infrared and optical bands, it also provided an opportunity for presentation of astronomical results from these techniques. As well as giving our colleagues from the Northern Hemisphere a break from midwinter, the location of the Symposium in Australia recognised the continuing development of astronomical interferometry in this country, especially the recent completion of the Australia Telescope radio array, and the progress toward com missioning of the Sydney University Stellar Interferometer. A number of the par ticipants visited these instruments during the post-symposium tour."

This thesis is devoted to ANTARES, the first underwater neutrino telescope in the Mediterranean sea. As the main scientific analysis, a search for high-energy neutrino emission from the region of the Fermi bubbles has been performed using data from the ANTARES detector. A method for the background estimation using off-zones has been developed specially for this measurement. A new likelihood for the limits calculation which treats both observations in the on-zone and in the off-zone in the similar way and also includes different systematic uncertainties has been constructed. The analysis of 2008-2011 ANTARES data yielded a 1.2 excess of events in the Fermi bubble regions, compatible with the no-signal hypothesis. For the optimistic case of no energy cutoff in the flux, the upper limit is within a factor of three of the prediction of the purely hadronic model based on the measured gamma-ray flux. The sensitivity improves as more data are accumulated (more than 65% gain in the sensitivity is expected once 2012-2016 data are added to the analysis).

In the recent years, space-based observation methods have led to a subst- tially improved understanding of Earth system. Geodesy and geophysics are contributing to this development by measuring the temporal and spatial va- ations of the Earth's shape, gravity ?eld, and magnetic ?eld, as well as at- sphere density. In the frame of the GermanR&D programmeGEOTECHNO- LOGIEN,researchprojectshavebeen launchedin2002relatedto the satellite missions CHAMP, GRACE and ESA's planned mission GOCE, to comp- mentary terrestrial and airborne sensor systems and to consistent and stable high-precision global reference systems for satellite and other techniques. In the initial 3-year phase of the research programme (2002-2004), new gravity ?eld models have been computed from CHAMP and GRACE data which outperform previous models in accuracy by up to two orders of m- nitude for the long and medium wavelengths. A special highlight is the - termination of seasonal gravity variations caused by changes in continental water masses. For GOCE, to be launched in 2006, new gravity ?eld analysis methods are under development and integrated into the ESA processing s- tem. 200,000 GPS radio occultation pro?les, observed by CHAMP, have been processed on an operational basis. They represent new and excellent inf- mation on atmospheric refractivity, temperature and water vapor. These new developments require geodetic space techniques (such as VLBI, SLR, LLR, GPS) to be combined and synchronized as if being one global instrument.

, This is the updated, widely revised, restructured and expanded third edition of Lena et al.'s successful work Observational Astrophysics. It presents a synthesis on tools and methods of observational astrophysics of the early 21st century. Written specifically for astrophysicists and graduate students, this textbook focuses on fundamental and sometimes practical limitations on the ultimate performance that an astronomical system may reach, rather than presenting particular systems in detail.
In little more than a decade there has been extraordinary progress in imaging and detection technologies, in the fields of adaptive optics, optical interferometry, in the sub-millimetre waveband, observation of neutrinos, discovery of exoplanets, to name but a few examples.
The work deals with ground-based and space-based astronomy and their respective fields. And it also presents the ambitious concepts behind space missions aimed for the next decades. Avoiding particulars, it covers the whole of the electromagnetic spectrum, and provides an introduction to the new forms of astronomy becoming possible with gravitational waves and neutrinos. It also treats numerical aspects of observational astrophysics: signal processing, astronomical databases and virtual observatories."

Outstanding progress in near-infrared detection technology and in real-time image processing has led astronomers to start undertaking all-sky surveys in the 1--2 mum range (project DENIS in Europe and 2MASS in the U.S.A.), surveys which will have a considerable impact in various areas of astronomy. This book gathers the contributions of more than 80 specialists involved in fields of interest as different as low mass stars, late stages of stellar evolution, star formation, stellar populations of the Galaxy and the Magellanic Clouds, the local structure of the Universe, and observational cosmology. It describes the impact on these fields of the exhaustive data bases and catalogs of stars and galaxies that these surveys will provide. The considerable interest of these documents for the future of infrared space and ground-based projects and the complementarity with other currently ongoing or planned surveys in other spectral ranges are emphasized.

This book, which has been in the making for some eighteen years, would never have begun were it not for Dr. David Dewhirst in 1976 kindly having shown the author a packet of papers in the archives of the Cambridge Obser vatories. These letters and miscellaneous papers of Fearon Fallows sparked an interest in the history of the Royal Observatory at the Cape of Good Hope which, after the diversion of producing several books on later phases of the Observatory, has finally resulted in a detailed study of the origin and first years of the Observatory's life. Publication of this book coincides with the 175th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Observatory, e.G.H. Observatories are built for the use of astronomers. They are built through astronomers, architects, engineers and contractors acting in concert (if not always in harmony). They are constructed, with whatever techniques and skills are available, from bricks, stones and mortar; but their construction may take a toll of personal relationships, patience, and flesh and blood."

The Workshop "Optical Detectors for Astronomy" was held during October 8-10, 1996 at the headquarters of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. This was the third meeting of its kind, previous meetings being held in 1991 and 1993, but this is the first ESO "CCD Workshop" that has published proceedings. Most of the leading manufacturers and major astronomical observatories were represented, with the 117 attendees coming together from 14 different countries that spanned every continent on Earth. The motivation for the ESO CCD Workshop series is the creation of informal and open venue of information exchange about astronomical CCD detectors and systems. Judging from the reaction and feedback of the participants, the 1996 workshop was as successful as the previous editions, which is a credit to all who attended. The Workshop was organized as a mixture of invited talks, oral presentations, poster sessions and roundtable discussions, the latter used to foster a free exchange of ideas among participants. These technical sessions were complemented by an opening reception and a congenial evening in downtown Munich, which included a walking tour of the historic area followed by dinner at the famous Franziskaner brewery and an after dinner talk by Walter Kosonocky, who reviewed the history of CCD technology.

Offering a series of well-defined problems supplemented by solutions, Exercises in Practical Astronomy: Using Photographs presents meaningful practical work in elementary astronomy and astrophysics. The book provides authentic astronomical photographs of very high quality on which different types of objects can be studied with equipment as simple as rulers and protractors. In addition to photographs and a set of exercises that cover 12 topics, the coverage includes ample hints and worked solutions that are designed to enable students to work independently. SI units are used for physical data and in conversions of astronomical quantities. This book is one of the few to use real rather than idealized or simplified data in the problems.

Recombination lines at radio wavelengths have been - and still are - a pow erful tool for modern astronomy. For more than thirty years they have allowed astronomers to probe the gases from which stars form. They have even been detected in the Sun. In addition, observations of these spectral lines facilitate basic research into the atom, in forms and environments that can only exist in the huge dimensions and extreme conditions of cosmic laboratories. We intend this book to serve as a tourist's guide to the world of Radio Recombination Lines. It contains three divisions: a history of their discovery, the physics of how they form and how their voyage to us influences their spectral profiles, and a description of their many astronomical contributions to date. The appendix includes supplementary calculations that may be useful to some astronomers. This material also includes tables of line frequencies from 12 MHz to 30THz (AlOJLm) as well as FORTRAN computer code to calculate the fine structure components of the lines, to evaluate radial matrix integrals, and to calculate the departure coefficients of hydrogen in a cosmic environment. It also describes how to convert observational to astrophysical units. The text includes extensive references to the literature to assist readers who want more details."

E. KONTIZAS Astronomical Institute National Observatory of Athens P. O. Box 20048 Athens GR-1181O GREECE The international conference on "Wide-Field Spectroscopy" and its sub ject matter were agreed during the general assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in August 1994 by the Working Group of Com mision 9 "Wi de-Field Imaging". This meeting gave an opportunity to world experts on this subject to gather in Athens, in order to discuss the cur rent exploitation and the impending opportunities that exist in the area of multi-object spectroscopy, with particular emphasis on: 1. Astronomical instruments, data acquisition, processing and analysis techniques. 2. Astrophysical problems best tackled through wide-field, multi-object spectroscopy. The new fibre optic technology offers an important tool for the advancement of basic research and the development of industrial applications. Astronom ical spectroscopy is a field of astronomy which has contributed much to the advancement of fundamental physics. The spectra of hot stars have been used to determine the well-known Balmer formula for the wavelength of hydrogen lines, in the late 19th century. Since then, spectroscopy has made enormous progress in stellar atmosphere studies, in kinematics, and in the detection of high redshifts in the Universe. The traditional techniques of obtaining wide-field spectroscopic data are based on slitless spectroscopy (objective prism). Several observations, world wide, make use ofthese tech niques in order to obtain information on the spectral properties of objects in large areas of the sky.

With contributions from leading scientists in the field, and edited by two of the most prominent astronomers of our time, this is a totally authoritative volume on X-ray astronomy that will be essential reading for everyone interested from students to astrophysicists and physicists. All the aspects of this exciting area of study are covered, from astronomical instrumentation to extragalactic X-ray astronomy.