Quasars can be used to verify the parallax zero-point of the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution

Context. The Gaia project will determine positions, proper motions, and parallaxes for more than one billion stars in our Galaxy. It is known that Gaia's two telescopes are affected by a small but significant variation of the basic angle between them. Unless this variation is taken into account during data processing, e.g. using on-board metrology, it causes systematic errors in the astrometric parameters, in particular a shift of the parallax zero-point. Previously, we suggested an early reduction of Gaia data for the subset of Tycho-2 stars (Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution; TGAS). Aims. We aim to investigate whether quasars can be used to independently verify the parallax zero-point already in early data reductions. This is not trivially possible as the observation interval is too short to disentangle parallax and proper motion for the quasar subset. Methods. We repeat TGAS simulations but additionally include simulated Gaia observations of quasars from ground-based surveys. All observations are simulated with basic angle variations. To obtain a full astrometric solution for the quasars in TGAS we explore the use of prior information for their proper motions. Results. It is possible to determine the parallax zero-point for the quasars with a few {\mu}as uncertainty, and it agrees to a similar precision with the zero-point for the Tycho-2 stars. The proposed strategy is robust even for quasars exhibiting significant fictitious proper motion due to a variable source structure, or when the quasar subset is contaminated with stars misidentified as quasars. Conclusions. Using prior information about quasar proper motions we could provide an independent verification of the parallax zero-point in early solutions based on less than one year of Gaia data.Comment: Astronomy & Astrophysics, accepted 25 October 2015, in press. Version 2 contains a few language improvements and a terminology change from 'fictitious proper motions' to 'spurious proper motions

Optical Flow in Mostly Rigid Scenes

The optical flow of natural scenes is a combination of the motion of the observer and the independent motion of objects. Existing algorithms typically focus on either recovering motion and structure under the assumption of a purely static world or optical flow for general unconstrained scenes. We combine these approaches in an optical flow algorithm that estimates an explicit segmentation of moving objects from appearance and physical constraints. In static regions we take advantage of strong constraints to jointly estimate the camera motion and the 3D structure of the scene over multiple frames. This allows us to also regularize the structure instead of the motion. Our formulation uses a Plane+Parallax framework, which works even under small baselines, and reduces the motion estimation to a one-dimensional search problem, resulting in more accurate estimation. In moving regions the flow is treated as unconstrained, and computed with an existing optical flow method. The resulting Mostly-Rigid Flow (MR-Flow) method achieves state-of-the-art results on both the MPI-Sintel and KITTI-2015 benchmarks.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures; accepted for publication at CVPR 201

Mosaics from arbitrary stereo video sequences

lthough mosaics are well established as a compact and non-redundant representation of image sequences, their application still suffers from restrictions of the camera motion or has to deal with parallax errors. We present an approach that allows construction of mosaics from arbitrary motion of a head-mounted camera pair. As there are no parallax errors when creating mosaics from planar objects, our approach first decomposes the scene into planar sub-scenes from stereo vision and creates a mosaic for each plane individually. The power of the presented mosaicing technique is evaluated in an office scenario, including the analysis of the parallax error

Radial velocities for the Hipparcos-Gaia Hundred-Thousand-Proper-Motion project

(abridged) The Hundred-Thousand-Proper-Motion (HTPM) project will determine the proper motions of ~113500 stars using a 23-year baseline. The proper motions will use the Hipparcos data, with epoch 1991.25, as first epoch and the first intermediate-release Gaia astrometry, with epoch ~2014.5, as second epoch. The expected HTPM proper-motion standard errors are 30-190 muas/yr, depending on stellar magnitude. Depending on the characteristics of an object, in particular its distance and velocity, its radial velocity can have a significant impact on the determination of its proper motion. The impact of this perspective acceleration is largest for fast-moving, nearby stars. Our goal is to determine, for each star in the Hipparcos catalogue, the radial-velocity standard error that is required to guarantee a negligible contribution of perspective acceleration to the HTPM proper-motion precision. We employ two evaluation criteria, both based on Monte-Carlo simulations, with which we determine which stars need to be spectroscopically (re-)measured. Both criteria take the Hipparcos measurement errors into account. For each star in the Hipparcos catalogue, we determine the confidence level with which the available radial velocity and its standard error, taken from the XHIP compilation catalogue, are acceptable. We find that for 97 stars, the radial velocities available in the literature are insufficiently precise for a 68.27% confidence level. We also identify 109 stars for which radial velocities are currently unknown yet need to be acquired to meet the 68.27% confidence level. To satisfy the radial-velocity requirements coming from our study will be a daunting task consuming a significant amount of spectroscopic telescope time. Fortunately, the follow-up spectroscopy is not time-critical since the HTPM proper motions can be corrected a posteriori once (improved) radial velocities become available.Comment: Accepted in A&

NASA ExoPAG Study Analysis Group 11: Preparing for the WFIRST Microlensing Survey

NASA's proposed WFIRST-AFTA mission will discover thousands of exoplanets with separations from the habitable zone out to unbound planets, using the technique of gravitational microlensing. The Study Analysis Group 11 of the NASA Exoplanet Program Analysis Group was convened to explore scientific programs that can be undertaken now, and in the years leading up to WFIRST's launch, in order to maximize the mission's scientific return and to reduce technical and scientific risk. This report presents those findings, which include suggested precursor Hubble Space Telescope observations, a ground-based, NIR microlensing survey, and other programs to develop and deepen community scientific expertise prior to the mission.Comment: 35 pages, 5 Figures. A brief overview of the findings is presented in the Executive Summary (2 pages

Three-dimensional structure of the Upper Scorpius association with the Gaia first data release

Using new proper motion data from recently published catalogs, we revisit the membership of previously identified members of the Upper Scorpius association. We confirmed 750 of them as cluster members based on the convergent point method, compute their kinematic parallaxes and combined them with Gaia parallaxes to investigate the 3D structure and geometry of the association using a robust covariance method. We find a mean distance of $146\pm 3\pm 6$~pc and show that the morphology of the association defined by the brightest (and most massive) stars yields a prolate ellipsoid with dimensions of $74\times38\times32$~pc$^{3}$, while the faintest cluster members define a more elongated structure with dimensions of $98\times24\times18$~pc$^{3}$. We suggest that the different properties of both populations is an imprint of the star formation history in this region.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, MNRAS letters (in press