26th Australian Institute of Physics Congress and the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics

Session

AIP ASTRO 4

ASTRO

10 Dec 2026, 11:00

Belinda Hutchinson Building (The University of Sydney )

Conveners

AIP ASTRO 4

• Vanessa Welke (University of Melbourne)

295. A Data-Driven Model of HST/NICMOS for High-Resolution Imaging

Hayden Greer (University of Sydney)

10/12/2026, 11:00

AIP | Astronomy (ASTRO)

Invited talk

The Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrograph (NICMOS) instrument aboard the Hubble Space Telescope was the highest resolution near-infrared imager in space before the James Webb Space Telescope, with an extensive archive of high-resolution and high-contrast surveys. The HST PSF is imperfectly known and strongly time-varying, due to breathing mode oscillations in the optical...

229. Differentiable Models for Radio Astronomy Interferometer Calibration and Image Synthesis

Ian Czekala (CSIRO/ATNF)

10/12/2026, 11:30

AIP | Astronomy (ASTRO)

Contributed Oral

Astronomical radio interferometers achieve exquisite angular resolution by cross-correlating signals from a cosmic source simultaneously observed by distant pairs of antennas to produce a Fourier-type measurement called a visibility. Here we describe the implementation of a feed-forward modeling approach to synthesize scientific images from interferometric visibility datasets, built using the...

298. Information-Theoretic Constraints of Diffraction-Limited Imaging

Milo Langker (University of Sydney)

10/12/2026, 11:45

AIP | Astronomy (ASTRO)

Contributed Oral

High-resolution astronomical imaging is conventionally constrained by the diffraction limit, which imparts a wavelength-dependent scaling on the impulse response of the optical system. This inherent chromaticity implies that images of unresolved sources encode their spectra. We demonstrate that with a differentiable forward model coupled with a rigorous information-theoretic approach, optimal...

335. Plasma-electrochemical systems for mimicking high-energy phenomena

Priya Mehta (School of Chemistry, University of Sydney)

10/12/2026, 12:00

AIP | Astronomy (ASTRO)

Contributed Oral

Carbon and nitrogen are two of the most important elements for biological molecules. On the early Earth (approx. 4 billion years ago), however, they were primarily found as very simple and stable compounds, such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide. How did essential organic molecules form from these relatively inert starting materials? High-energy natural phenomena, such as lightning strikes and...

515. CTA-Pol: Polarimetry of blazars in the CTA era

Nick Tothill (Western Sydney University)

10/12/2026, 12:15

AIP | Astronomy (ASTRO)

Contributed Oral

Blazar flares present as increased brightness of the jet from an Active Galactic Nucleus across the electromagnetic spectrum; they also display changes in polarisation fraction and direction. The Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) is a far more sensitive detector of gamma-ray blazar flares than previous instruments, and is already detecting them in the northern sky. CTA covers the whole sky from...