构建中国虚拟天文台的天文数据结点

随着天文观测数据的爆炸式增长以及数据网格技术等新兴IT技术的日趋成熟,虚拟天文台应运而生。虚拟天文台成为基于数据网格技术的解决复杂海量天文数据的访问和管理的一种有效手段。我们对现有中国虚拟天文台体系结构底层进行设计与实现,并完成了其核心部分一天文数据结点。天文数据结点可发布和管理异构的数据资源,为用户提供统一的数据访问接口,进而为天文学家实现对各种天文数据的无缝透明访问和处理提供了方便。本文重点介绍了我们设计的天文数据结点的体系结构,以及结点各部分的功能,并讨论了其关键技术的实现。     

近代天文圆顶发展概况

综述了国内外天文圆顶的各种设计方案，比较了各种方案的性能，并介绍了为改善圆顶性能，降低造价进行的相关研究，以及为下一代巨型地面望远镜圆顶进行的预研究．结合目前正在研制的大天区多目标光纤光谱望远镜——LAMOST，简述了我国LAMOST望远镜圆顶的设计方案及其相关研究的概况。     

The IPS work in Beijing astronomical observatory

This article describes the IPS work in the Beijing astronomical observatory including the hardware and software of the instrument and some theoretical research.The project is supported by the China National Nature Science Fundation under the program 49391400     

一种新的基于2维傅里叶谱图像的恒星光谱特征提取方法和深度网络分类应用

天体光谱分类是天文学研究的重要内容之一,其关键是从光谱数据中选择和提取对分类识别最有效的特征构建特征空间.提出一种新的基于2维傅里叶谱图像的特征提取方法,并应用于LAMOST (the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope)恒星光谱数据的分类研究中.光谱数据来源于LAMOST Data Release 5(DR5),选取30000条F、 G和K型星光谱数据,利用短时傅里叶变换(Short-Time Fourier Transform, STFT)将1维光谱数据变换成2维傅里叶谱图像,对得到的2维傅里叶谱图像采用深度卷积网络模型进行分类,得到的分类准确率是92.90%.实验结果表明通过对LAMOST恒星光谱数据进行STFT可得到光谱的2维傅里叶谱图像,谱图像构成了新的光谱数据特征和特征空间,新的特征对于光谱数据分类是有效的.此方法是对光谱分类的一种全新尝试,对海量天体光谱的分类和挖掘处理有一定的开创意义.     

Doing Research on Eclipsing Binary Stars with Small Telescopes and PC computers

Astronomical research with a small telescope (20 cm – 40 cm) has always been a challenging problem. The invention of CCD cameras and personal computers has now put this question to past as small telescopes can do good and practicle science. This paper describes the use of small telescope in the study of eclipsing binary stars. Binary stars play an important role as astrophysical laboratories in our quest to understand the evolution and structure of stars. The most useful aspects of research with a small telescope in binary star research is; 1) as a viable teaching laboratory for begining students 2) to teach and learn the fundamental observational techniques that are common to many types of astronomical research areas 3) as a starting point to initiate research programs in observational astronomy, optics, instrumentation, computational astrophysics and 4) as a foundation to develop an infrastructure and technical know how for larger telescope facility. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Research on the readout noise suppression method for digital correlated double sampling

As the areas of CCD detectors and CCD mosaics have become larger and larger,the number of readout channels in astronomical cameras has increased accordingly to keep the image readout time within an acceptable range.For the large area cameras or the mosaic cameras,the analog Correlated Double Sampling(aCDS)circuit used in traditional astronomical cameras for suppressing readout noise is difficult to integrate into the camera controllers within the constraints of the space and energy consumption.Recently,digital CDS(dCDS)technology has been developed to solve this problem,which also offers novel analysis and noise suppression methods.In this study,a mathematical model is presented to conveniently analyze the frequency characteristic of a dCDS circuit,which is then simulated by a numerical method for investigating the noise suppression capability with different sampling weights.Importantly,using this model,the extreme point with lowest readout noise can be predicted for a certain dCDS model;and for a specific CCD readout frequency,readout noise can be suppressed by selecting the proper dCDS model.A testing system is then constructed for validating the efficiency of the proposed method.     

The Knorre astronomers' dynasty

We attempt to throw light upon the poorly known astronomical dynasty of Knorre and describe its contribution to astronomy. The founder of the dynasty, Ernst Christoph Friedrich Knorre (1759–1810), was born in Germany in 1759, and since 1802 he was a Professor of Mathematics at the Tartu University, and observer at its temporary observatory. He determined the first coordinates of Tartu by stellar observations. Karl Friedrich Knorre (1801–1883) was the first director of the Naval Observatory in Nikolaev since the age of 20, provided the Black Sea navy with accurate time and charts, trained mariners in astronomical navigation, and certified navigation equipment. He compiled star maps and catalogues, and determined positions of comets and planets. He also participated in Bessel's project of the Academic Star Charts, and was responsible for Hora 4, published by the Berlin Academy of Sciences. This sheet permitted to discover two minor planets, Astraea and Flora. Viktor Knorre (1840–1919) was born in Nikolaev. In 1862 he left for Berlin to study astronomy. After defending his thesis for a doctor's degree, he went to Pulkovo as an astronomical calculator in 1867. Since 1873 Viktor worked as an observer of the Berlin Observatory Fraunhofer refractor. His main research focussed on minor planets, comets and binary stars. He discovered the minor planets Koronis, Oenone, Hypatia and Penthesilea. Viktor Knorre also worked on improving astronomical instrumentation, e.g. the Knorre & Heele equatorial telescope mounting (© 2009 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

中国虚拟天文台可视化服务

虚拟天文台将使天文资料和相关资源的获取更加方便，阐述了可视化对虚拟天文台的必要性和重要性，着重说明了coneSearch界面可视化的内容以及实现方法和开发工具。     

科研型天文创新人才培养模式的探索与实践 ---以贵州师范大学``南仁东''创新人才实验班为例

我国天文大科学设备郭守敬望远镜(Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope,LAMOST)、慧眼硬X射线调制卫星(Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope, HXMT)以及500 m口径球面射电望远镜(Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope, FAST)陆续建成使用,急需大量从事天文前沿科学研究的创新人才.然而,天文专业发展的区域分布不均衡严重影响了天文专业人才的培养.贵州师范大学立足于天文学科发展需求和贵州省省情,成立了“南仁东”创新人才实验班(简称南仁东班).同时,贵州师范大学通过与中国科学院国家天文台院校协同,借助其教育和科研资源优势,探索与实践了科研型天文创新人才培养的新模式.在课程思政、人才培养和师资队伍建设等方面取得了较好的成绩.“院校协同,培养科研型天文创新人才”的人才培养模式对西部地区乃至全国开展天文专业人才培养具有重要的借鉴价值.     

I S L A An Astronomical World Space Observatory for The First Century of the 3 rd Millenium

ISLA will be an astronomical observatory, operating at the upper limit of our planet Earth atmosphere, offering space like observing conditions in most aspects. ISLA can be maintained easily, modified easily if necessary, always kept at the state of the art and operated for very extended periods without polluting the stratosphere. ISLA is ideally suited to become the first world space observatory as the observing conditions are very much space-like – diffraction limited angular resolution, very low ambient temperature, remote control – however ISLA is easily accessible, telescopes and instruments can be continuously improved and ISLA's costs corresponds only to those of ground-based modern astronomical installations like the ESO-VLT-, KECK- and GEMINI-observatories. The cost of observing and experimenting on ISLA will be orders of magnitudes lower than those of building and operating any space telescope, allowing the astronomers of developing nations to participate in the ISLA observatory within their limited financial possibilities as competent and full partners. ISLA's 4-m and 2-m telescopes will operate diffraction limited from 0.3 μm in the optical, over the infrared, far-infrared to the sub-mm spectral range. ISLA's individual telescopes will permit imaging with 20 milli-arcsec spatial resolution in the optical, 5 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope. ISLA's telescopes can be combined to form an interferometer with a maximum baseline of 250 m with nearly complete coverage of the u,v plane. Interferometric resolution will be of the order of 20 micro-arcsec for the optical. ISLA will thus offer spatial resolution comparable or better than the intercontinental VLBI radio interferometers. ISLA's telescope efficiency will be many orders of magnitude better than comparable ground-based telescopes. The light collecting power of ISLA's interferometric telescopes will be orders of magnitudes greater than the future space interferometers under discussion. ISLA, being an aviation project and not a space project, can be realised in the typical time scale for the development of aviation: about 5 years. ISLA's cost for the whole observatory, including its movable ground station etc. will be of the order of a typical medium size ESA space mission. ISLA's lifetime will be in excess of many decades, as it can easily be maintained, modernised, repaired and improved. ISLA will become the origin of a new astronomical international organisation with worldwide participation. ISLA's telescopes will be of the greatest importance to all astronomical fields, as it will permit to study much fainter, much more distant objects with microscopic spatial resolution in wavelength regions inaccessible from ground. ISLA's many telescopes permit easily simultaneous observations at many wavelengths for rapidly varying objects, from continuously monitoring the surfaces of the planets in our solar system, surfaces of close-by stars, nuclei of galaxies to QSO's. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Diurnal Atmospheric Extinction Over Oukaïmeden Observatory using IRIS Database: 1989–1997. Comparison With The Other IRIS Sites

In this work, we use data of nine years (1989 to 1997) at all IRIS sites (Culgoora, Kumbel, Oukaïmeden, Izaña, La Silla and Stanford, devoted to the study of the solar velocity oscillation) to study of diurnal atmospheric extinction coefficient behaviour at Oukaïmeden observatory and to compare it to the others. By this study, we can conclude that the mean extinction coefficient at Oukaimeden is around 0.120 mag airmass^-1. Besides, we show that the daily extinction coefficient varies under the influence of the seasonal effect. By the comparison of Oukaïmeden to the other sites, we showed that Oukaïmeden has a good photometric sky quality and constitutes a potential site for astronomical observations in the north hemisphere.     

Dichroic Filters For Astronomical X-Ray Polarimetry

We describe a programme of research to investigate materials which exhibit linear dichroism at X-ray wavelengths, and to assess their potential as astronomical X-ray polarimeters. The availability of polarising filters for X-rays would offer an efficient method of quantifying the polarisation of X-ray radiation from distant, cosmic sources. A polarising dichroic filter is expected to be a compact, low mass device which could add polarimetry capability to an instrument by being introduced into the optical path ahead of a detector. We provide estimates of sensitivity in the context of the proposed XEUS observatory, which compare favourably with those for the most promising alternative technology. We also discuss a number of astrophysical sources which are suited to polarimetric study at discrete energies offered by the X-ray dichroic filter design.     

Planning and Scheduling of Payloads of AstroSat During Initial and Normal Phase Observations

On 28th September 2015, India launched its first astronomical space observatory AstroSat, successfully. AstroSat carried five astronomy payloads, namely, (i) Cadmium Zinc Telluride Imager (CZTI), (ii) Large Area X-ray Proportional Counter (LAXPC), (iii) Soft X-ray Telescope (SXT), (iv) Ultra Violet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) and (v) Scanning Sky Monitor (SSM) and therefore, has the capability to observe celestial objects in multi-wavelength. Four of the payloads are co-aligned along the positive roll axis of the spacecraft and the remaining one is placed along the positive yaw axis direction. All the payloads are sensitive to bright objects and specifically, require avoiding bright Sun within a safe zone of their bore axes in orbit. Further, there are other operational constraints both from spacecraft side and payloads side which are to be strictly enforced during operations. Even on-orbit spacecraft manoeuvres are constrained to about two of the axes in order to avoid bright Sun within this safe zone and a special constrained manoeuvre is exercised during manoeuvres. The planning and scheduling of the payloads during the Performance Verification (PV) phase was carried out in semi-autonomous/manual mode and a complete automation is exercised for normal phase/Guaranteed Time Observation (GuTO) operations. The process is found to be labour intensive and several operational software tools, encompassing spacecraft sub-systems, on-orbit, domain and environmental constraints, were built-in and interacted with the scheduling tool for appropriate decision-making and science scheduling. The procedural details of the complex scheduling of a multi-wavelength astronomy space observatory and their working in PV phase and in normal/GuTO phases are presented in this paper.     

基于ASCOM标准的天文电动调焦器设计

随着天文技术的不断发展,远程观测和自主观测逐渐成为天文观测的主流趋势,自动调焦技术也越来越受到重视.电动调焦器是天文望远镜不可或缺的附属设备,是实现自动调焦的关键设备.为实现云南天文台丽江观测站10英寸米德望远镜的自动调焦,自行研发了一套天文电动调焦器,设计相关控制电路,制定串口通信协议,并编写了一套开源天文公共对象模...     

基于自适应滤波的干扰消除方法研究

射电天文信号非常微弱,电磁环境对射电望远镜观测至关重要,通常可以利用地形、建立无线电宁静区、进行电磁屏蔽与防护等手段来减小电磁干扰.然而,仍有一些干扰难以屏蔽.故提出了一种基于自适应滤波的干扰消除方法,可用于复杂噪声环境中天文信号的提取.该方法借助自适应横向滤波器,采用最小均方(Least Mean Square, LMS)误差算法,以系统误差和收敛性为评判标准,通过改变步长与阶数对滤波效果进行优化,仿真结果显示该滤波器能在保证算法收敛的前提下有效提取信号.为了检验该算法的有效性,选取了新疆天文台南山26 m射电望远镜和Parkes 64 m射电望远镜记录的观测数据,采用设计的滤波器分别对不同的实测数据进行测试,验证了该滤波器的有效性.理论分析与实验结果一致表明该方法能有效消除天文观测中的干扰信号,具有一定的实用性.     

Study of X-ray transients with Scanning Sky Monitor (SSM) onboard AstroSat

Scanning Sky Monitor (SSM) onboard AstroSat is an X-ray sky monitor in the energy range 2.5–10 keV. SSM scans the sky for X-ray transient sources in this energy range of interest. If an X-ray transient source is detected in outburst by SSM, the information will be provided to the astronomical community for follow-up observations to do a detailed study of the source in various other bands. SSM instrument, since its power-ON in orbit, has observed a number of X-ray sources. This paper discusses observations of few X-ray transients by SSM. The flux reported by SSM for few sources during its Performance Verification phase (PV phase) is studied and the results are discussed.     

1.2米地平式望远镜指向模型的研究 (1.全天指向模型的建立)

介绍了云南天文台1.2米地平式望远镜用于天文观测和图像采集处理的方法,建立了新的、独特的全天指向模型,大大提高了该望远镜的指向精度,达到1″,并在多年的实际应用中得到验证。     

Interactive visualization of the largest radioastronomy cubes

3D visualization is an important data analysis and knowledge discovery tool, however, interactive visualization of large 3D astronomical datasets poses a challenge for many existing data visualization packages. We present a solution to interactively visualize larger-than-memory 3D astronomical data cubes by utilizing a heterogeneous cluster of CPUs and GPUs. The system partitions the data volume into smaller sub-volumes that are distributed over the rendering workstations. A GPU-based ray casting volume rendering is performed to generate images for each sub-volume, which are composited to generate the whole volume output, and returned to the user. Datasets including the HI Parkes All Sky Survey (HIPASS – 12 GB) southern sky and the Galactic All Sky Survey (GASS – 26 GB) data cubes were used to demonstrate our framework’s performance. The framework can render the GASS data cube with a maximum render time <0.3 s with 1024 × 1024 pixels output resolution using three rendering workstations and eight GPUs. Our framework will scale to visualize larger datasets, even of Terabyte order, if proper hardware infrastructure is available.     

Prospects for astronomical development in South Africa

Because of its geographical location and (astronomically) excellent climate South Africa can make an unique contribution to international astronomical research. An assessment of recent developments in telescope technology has shown that an advanced technology telescope of 4m-class can be constructed which will out-perform most existing 4m-class telescopes. Detailed consideration is given to the construction of such a telescope for optical/infrared astronomy, the new science that this will enable and the selection of a site of sufficiently good quality to justify the erection of such a telescope. If a telescope of this nature is sited in southern Africa it would provide the premier astronomical facility in Africa for decades to come.     

Astronomy in Tadjikistan

The astronomical investigations in the present Tadjikistan (USSR) are carried out by the Institute of Astrophysics of the Academy of Sciences of Tadjik SSR. The main scientific fields of investigation are meteors, comets, and variable stars. The Institute has two observational stations: the Gissar observatory with photographic and radar meteor patrols, a 70 cm telescope, a 40 cm Zeiss astrograph, etc., and the Sanglok observatory with the Ritchey-Chrétien 1 m telescope.Paper presented at the IAU Third Asian-Pacific Regional Meeting, held in Kyoto, Japan, between 30 September–6 October, 1984.