Detecting Arctic snow and ice cover with FY-1D global data

Chinese meteorological satellite FY-1D can obtain global data from four spectral channels which include visible channel(0.58-0.68 μm) and infrared channels(0.84-0.89 μm,10.3-11.3 μm,11.5-12.5 μm).2366 snow and ice samples,2024 cloud samples,1602 land samples and 1648 water samples were selected randomly from Arctic imageries.Land and water can be detected by spectral features.Snow-ice and cloud can be classified by textural features.The classifier is Bayes classifier.By synthesizing five d ays classifying result of Arctic snow and ice cover area,complete Arctic snow and ice cover area can be obtained.The result agrees with NOAA/NESDIS IMS products up to 70%.     

射电脉冲星观测资料及其启示

在本文中先简要介绍了８０年代以来射电脉冲星方面的观测进展，然后详细介绍了射电脉冲星的第一手观测资料，包括空间分布，传播特性，时间特性，脉冲轮廓与偏振以及频谱特性等，并详细综述观测资料对我们提供的信息及给我们的启示，为理论模型的建立和检验提供了基础。     

Seeing Conditions at Sutherland. Results of the 1992/93 seeing campaign

In order to decide whether the seeing conditions at SAAO/Sutherland justify the erection of a 3.5 m telescope and also to compare Sutherland with the Gamsberg/Namibia site, a seeing campaign covering 15 months has been carried out. For direct comparison with the results of the seeing campaign at Gamsberg twenty years before the same QUESTAR telescope was employed. The seeing is determined by the scattering of the star-trail exposed on a film in the focal plane of the telescope. The campaign commenced in February 1992. Up to May 1993, data for 204 nights, that is 47.3% of the total number of nights, were collected. Due to wind speeds above 30 km h^-1, 25 out of the 204 nights were not considered in the final reduction. The useful 179 nights are evenly distributed over the campaign period. The median seeing value for the whole period is = 0.52. There are differences during the year: the best season gives = 0.42, the worst = 0.67. Each night was divided into three intervals, although data for each of the three intervals were not always available. Generally, there is an improvement in the seeing during the course of a night. The results are compared to the seeing values of Gamsberg/Namibia and ESO/La Silla.     

Research on Parallel Algorithms for uv-faceting Imaging

The uv-faceting imaging is one of the widely used large field of view imaging technologies, and will be adopted for the data processing of the low-frequency array in the first stage of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA1). Due to the scale of the raw data of SKA1 is unprecedentedly large, the efficiency of data processing directly using the original uv-faceting imaging will be very low. Therefore, a uv-faceting imaging algorithm based on the MPI (Message Passing Interface)+OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) and a uv-faceting imaging algorithm based on the MPI+CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) are proposed. The most time-consuming data reading and gridding in the algorithm are optimized in parallel. The verification results show that the results of the proposed two algorithms are basically consistent with that obtained by the current mainstream data processing software CASA (Common Astronomy Software Applications), which indicates that the proposed two algorithms are basically correct. Further analysis of the accuracy and total running time shows that the MPI+CUDA method is better than the MPI+OpenMP method in both the correctness rate and running speed. The performance test results show that the proposed algorithms are effective and have certain extensibility.     

Photometric Follow-up Transit (Primary Eclipse) Observations of WASP-43 b and TrES-3b and A Study on Their Transit Timing Variations

Two photometric follow-up transit (primary eclipse) observations on WASP-43 b and four observations on TrES-3 b are performed using the Xuyi Near-Earth Object Survey Telescope. After differential photometry and light curve analysis, the physical parameters of the two systems are obtained and are in good match with the literature. Combining with transit data from a lot of literature, the residuals (O ? C) of transit observations of both systems are fitted with the linear and quadratic functions. With the linear fitting, the periods and transit timing variations (TTVs) of the planets are obtained, and no obvious periodic TTV signal is found in both systems after an analysis. The maximum mass of a perturbing planet located at the 1:2 mean motion resonance (MMR) for WASP-43 b and TrES-3 b is estimated to be 1.826 and 1.504 Earth mass, respectively. By quadratic fitting, it is confirmed that WASP-43 b may have a long-term TTV which means an orbital decay. The decay rate is shown to be P? = (?0.005248 ± 0.001714) s·yr^?1, and compared with the previous results. Based on this, the lower limit of the stellar tidal quality parameter of WASP-43 is calculated to be ${Q^{\prime }}_{*}\ge 1.5\times {10}^5$, and the remaining lifetimes of the planets are presented for the different ${Q^{\prime }}_{*}$ values of the two systems, correspondingly.     

Piloting a network of small telescopes

The Pilot Small Telescope Network (PSTN) is a state‐of the art system of easily replicable and scalable hardware, software, servers, eXtensible Markup Language (XML) protocols, and network middleware connecting and developing a pilot array of robotic telescopes to one another and the user community. The PSTN is a developmental project that will allow growing access to these telescopes, and make available data to faculty, students and others in an environment of collaboration. The underlying goal of the PSTN is to broaden the quantity and quality of astronomical education and research, particularly with a focus on traditionally underserved populations. (© 2006 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

BHαBAR: big Hα kinematical sample of barred spiral galaxies – I. Fabry–Perot observations of 21 galaxies

We present the Hα gas kinematics of 21 representative barred spiral galaxies belonging to the BHαBAR sample. The galaxies were observed with FaNTOmM, a Fabry–Perot integral-field spectrometer, on three different telescopes. The three-dimensional data cubes were processed through a robust pipeline with the aim of providing the most homogeneous and accurate data set possible useful for further analysis. The data cubes were spatially binned to a constant signal-to-noise ratio, typically around 7. Maps of the monochromatic Hα emission line and of the velocity field were generated and the kinematical parameters were derived for the whole sample using tilted-ring models. The photometrical and kinematical parameters (position angle of the major axis, inclination, systemic velocity and kinematical centre) are in relative good agreement, except perhaps for the later-type spirals.     

Compressed sensing for next generation instruments

This document discusses the possibility of using compressed sensing techniques for measuring 2D spectro‐polarimetric information using only one etalon and a broad prefilter. Instead of using an etalon and an extremely narrow prefilter (with all the subsequent problems of alignment), the idea is to use multiplexing techniques to include in the observations all the secondary peaks of the etalon. The reconstruction of the signal is done under the assumption that it can be efficiently reproduced in an orthogonal basis set (© 2010 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

The Basic Shape Classification of Space Debris with Light Curves

We study the machine learning method for classifying the basic shape of space debris in both simulated and observed data experiments, where light curves are used as the input features. In the dataset for training and testing, simulated light curves are derived from four types of debris within different shapes and materials. Observed light curves are extracted from Mini-Mega TORTORA (MMT) database which is a publicly accessible source of space object photometric records. The experiments employ the deep convolutional neural network, make comparisons with other machine learning algorithms, and the results show CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) is better. In simulational experiments, both types of cylinder can be distinguished perfectly, and two other types of satellite have around 90% probability to be classified. Rockets and defunct satellites can achieve 99% success rate in binary classification, but in further sub-classes classifications, the rate becomes relatively lower.