The National Foundation Day of Korea (개천절, 開天節) is currently celebrated on October 3 in Gregorian calendar. We review the history of dating the National Foundation Day of Korea and make a suggestion that it be celebrated on October 3 in the lunar calendar. We present numerous historical records on heaven-worship rites supporting the date October 3 in the lunar calendar. It is pointed out that October 3 in the solar calendar has been adopted in 1949 by the National Assembly with the thought that the lunar calendar is inferior and behind the times. The thought originates from misunderstanding on the value of the lunar calendar and from the ignorance of importance of history and tradition. Since there are now many national holidays that follow the lunar calendar, the logic of the National Assembly in 1949 also makes no sense. We emphasize that the lunar calendar should be followed for the National Foundation Day of Korea for its historical and symbolic characteristics restoration. We also investigate the year of the foundation of the first country of Korea, Dangun Joseon. It is found that even though the majority of the literature before late 15th century recorded the beginning year of Dangun Joseon dynasty to be equal to that of Liao Dynasty (堯), it was accidentally changed to the 25th year of Liao Dynasty in 1484 through a misinterpretation of the previous records. We claim that the beginning year of Dangun Joseon should be set to that of Liao Dynasty as recorded in the original literature in the earlier days. According to the two main opinions accepted by Korea, the beginning year of Liao Dynasty was 2357 B.C. or 2333 B.C., which correspond to the year of Gap-Jin (the 41st year of the sexagenary cycle) or Mu-Jin (the 4th year of the sexagenary cycle), respectively.
First light galaxies have predictable linear clustering, and are expected to produce fluctuations with a characteristic spatial power spectrum, which peaks at an angular scale of ~ 10 arcminutes and in the 1―2 μm spectral regions. The Cosmic Infrared Background ExpeRiment 2 (CIBER2) is a dedicated sounding rocket mission for measuring the fluctuations in the extragalactic infrared background light, following up the previous successful measurements of CIBER1. With a 28.5 cm telescope accompanied with three arms of camera barrels and a dual broadband filter on each H2RG (λc = 2.5 μm) array, CIBER2 can measure 6 bands of wide field (1.1 × 2.2 degrees) up to 3 AB magnitudes deeper than CIBER1. This project is leaded by California Institute of Technology/Jet Propulsion Laboratory, collaborating internationally with Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Japan, Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, Korea Basic Science Institute, and Seoul National University. The Korean team is in charge of 1) one H2RG scientific array, 2) ground station hardware and software, 3) telescope lenses, and 4) flight and test bed electronics fabrication. In this paper, we describe the detailed activities of the Korean participation as well as the current status of the CIBER2 project.
The IGRINS is a near infrared high resolution spectrograph jointly developed by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute and the University of Texas at Austin. We present design and fabrication of the optomechanical mount for the five mirrors, i.e., an input fold mirror, a slit mirror, a dichroic, and two camera fold mirrors. Based on the structure analysis and the thermal analysis of finite element methods, the optomechanical mount scheme satisfies the mechanical and the thermal design requirements given by the optical tolerance analysis. The performance of the fabricated mirror mounts has been verified through three IGRINS commissioning runs.
We develop a real-time data transfer system for the Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) photometry data and test whether it is suitable for Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI) and three different observatories, which are Cerro Tololo Inter-Ameriacan Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, Siding Springs Observatory (SSO) in Australia, and South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in South Africa. For this test, we use a high speed global network being dedicated for researches. From the test, we obtain that the elapsed times between KASI and each three observatories, CTIO, SSO, and SAAO to transfer 650 MB of data are 99.0, 9.2, 119.0 seconds, respectively. This means that the system can be used for the real-time data processing of KMTNet.