Nordic-Baltic Astronomy Days 2026

Session

26-A3: Instrumentation

Tu-10A

26 May 2026, 16:15

Room A

Description

Chair: Heidi Korhonen

249. Research in Baldone Observatory

Ilgmars Eglitis (University of Latvia, ESTF, Institute of Astronomy)

26/05/2026, 16:15

Oral

Studies of small bodies of the Solar System
Astronomers at the Baldone Observatory conduct extensive studies of small bodies in the Solar System using the Schmidt telescope. One major research direction involves measuring the positions and brightness of these objects in the U, B, V, R, and I photometric filters. Using this telescope, 149 new asteroids have been discovered, including a...

250. BLAST, the Binocular Large Area Survey Telescope

Michael I. Andersen (DAWN Cosmology Centre, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen)

26/05/2026, 16:30

Oral

BLAST is going to monitor the sky for transients at high time resolution. The core science cases are detecting: 1) short lived bright transients, 2) slower transients, like SNe, 3) Jupiter like transiting planets in Jupiter like orbits, 4) asteroids heading towards Earth. We are building prototypes of very wide field cameras, that in pairs monitor each 1.1% of the sky (450 sqr degrees) with a...

251. Hard X-ray polarization results from XL-Calibur 2024 flight: Crab and Cyg X-1

Varun Varun (KTH Royal Institute of Technology)

26/05/2026, 16:45

Oral

The advent of X-ray polarimetry has marked a major advancement in high-energy astrophysics, driven by the successful launch of IXPE and its groundbreaking measurements in the soft X-ray band (2–8 keV). Currently, several efforts are underway for getting more significant results in hard X-rays provided by previous missions like PoGo+. XL-Calibur is a balloon-borne hard X-ray polarimeter...

252. The EASST Network and BHTOM Platform for Coordinated Microlensing Studies

Marius Maskoliūnas (Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astronomy. Vilnius university)

26/05/2026, 17:00

Oral

The European Astronomical Society of Small Telescopes (EASST) is a non-profit organization dedicated to enabling high-quality astronomical research with small and medium aperture telescopes. Within this framework, the Black Hole Target and Observation Manager (BHTOM) has been developed as a robust, web-based observational coordination system designed to support both professional and amateur...

253. Presenting PyLongslit – a new manual pipeline for long-slit spectroscopy

Kostas Valeckas (Nordic Optical Telescope, Copenhagen University)

26/05/2026, 17:15

Oral

We present PyLongslit, a simple and transparent Python pipeline for processing astronomical long-slit spectroscopy data obtained with CCD detectors. The software is designed to prioritize manual execution, robustness, and pedagogical clarity, providing an accessible alternative to highly automated “black-box” reduction pipelines. The pipeline emphasizes visualization and quality assessment...