The Kepler mission has shown that small planets are extremely common. It is likely that nearly every star in the sky hosts at least one rocky planet. We just need to look hard enough - but this requires vast amounts of telescope time. MINERVA (MINiature Exoplanet Radial Velocity Array) is a dedicated exoplanet observatory with the primary goal of discovering rocky, Earth-like planets orbiting in the habitable zone of bright, nearby stars. The MINERVA team is a collaboration among UNSW Australia, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Penn State University, University of Montana, and the California Institute of Technology. The four-telescope MINERVA array will be sited at the F.L. Whipple Observatory on Mt Hopkins in Arizona, USA. Full science operations will begin in mid-2015 with all four telescopes and a stabilised spectrograph capable of high-precision Doppler velocity measurements. We will observe ~100 of the nearest, brightest, Sun-like stars every night for at least five years. Detailed simulations of the target list and survey strategy lead us to expect 154 new low-mass planets.

The physical and chemical properties of prestellar cores, especially massive ones, are still far from being well understood due to the lack of a large sample. The low dust temperature (< 14 K) of Planck cold clumps makes them promising candidates for prestellar objects or for sources at the very initial stages of protostellar collapse. We have been conducting a series of observations toward Planck cold clumps (PCCs) with ground-based radio telescopes. In general, when compared with other star forming samples (e.g. infrared dark clouds), PCCs are more quiescent, suggesting that most of them may be in the earliest phase of star formation. However, some PCCs are associated with protostars and molecular out ows, indicating that not all PCCs are in a prestellar phase. We have identied hundreds of starless dense clumps from a mapping survey with the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) 13.7-m telescope. Follow-up observations suggest that these dense clumps are ideal targets to search for prestellar objects.

Y -band is a broad passband that is centered at ~1 μm. It is becoming a new, popular window for extragalactic study especially for observations of red objects thanks to recent CCD technology de- velopments. In order to better understand the general characteristics of objects in Y -band, and to investigate the promise of Y -band observations with small telescopes, we carried out imaging observa- tions of several extragalactic fields, brown dwarfs, and high redshift quasars with Y -band filter at the Mt. Lemmon Optical Astronomy Observatory and the Maidanak observatory. From our observations, we constrain the bright end of the galaxy and the stellar number counts in Y -band. We also test the usefulness of high redshift quasar (z >6) selection via i − z − Y color-color diagram, to demonstrate that the i − z − Y color-color diagram is effective for the selection of high redshift quasars even with a conventional optical CCD camera installed at a 1-m class telescope.

We carry out 100-GHz band test observations with the newly-constructed KVN 21-m radio telescopes in order to evaluate their performance. The three telescopes have similar performance parameters. The pointing accuracies are about 4" rms for the entire sky. The main beam sizes are about 30" (FWHMs), which is nearly the diffraction limit of the telescopes at the observing frequency (97 GHz). The measured aperture and main-beam efficiencies are about 52% and 46%, respectively, for all three telescopes. The estimated moon efficiency is ~84% for the KVN Tamna telescope. The first sidelobes appear 50" (~1.6 xFWHM) from the main beam centers and the levels are on average -14 dB.

By joining the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) project, Korean astronomers will get 10% of the GMT time, starting in the late 2010s. To prepare the GMT era, it is important to evaluate the current observational research activities. We surveyed the research programs performed by domestic astronomers during 2007A - 2010A period, using optical/near - IR telescopes with a medium to large aperture mirror (larger than 4 m). We describe the method and criteria of the survey, and present the results of the analysis based on the collected data.

A new concept of a simple and cheap construction of giant telescope is described.