The presence of neutral C 60 fullerenes in circumstellar environments has been firmly established by astronomical observations as well as laboratory experiments and quantum-chemistry calculations. However, the large variations observed in the C 60 17.4 μm/18.9 μm band ratios indicate that either additional emitters should contribute to the

The optical design of an integral field unit (IFU) based on image-slicers represents an interesting design exercise because of the small size of the components and the critical parameters to reduce optical aberrations. When the IFU to be designed is also intended to substitute an IFU prototype that is already integrated into a spectropolarimeter

Active galactic nuclei (AGNs) make up about 35 per cent of the more than 250 sources detected in very high-energy (VHE) gamma rays to date with the imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes. Apart from four nearby radio galaxies and two AGNs of unknown type, all known VHE AGNs are blazars. Knowledge of the cosmological redshift of gamma-ray blazars

Remote sensing of the Earth has demonstrated that photosynthesis is traceable as the vegetation red edge (VRE), which is a steep rise in the reflection spectrum of vegetation, and as solar-induced fluorescence. This study examines the detectability of biological fluorescence from two types of photosynthetic pigments, chlorophylls (Chls) and

Developing an effective automatic classifier to separate genuine sources from artifacts is essential for transient follow-ups in wide-field optical surveys. The identification of transient detections from the subtraction artifacts after the image differencing process is a key step in such classifiers, known as real-bogus classification problem. We