coffee/tea and cookies will be served in the lounge of Steinbach Hall (52 Hillhouse) starting at 2 PM.
Observational astrophysics is frequently driven by the desire for ever increasing angular resolution, resulting in larger and larger telescopes. However, telescopes with very small apertures can sometimes perform cosmological measurements as important as their larger siblings. In this talk, I will present several examples of small aperture, space-based experiments providing unique views of the large-scale structure of the Universe. My discussion will present recent results from the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) that has successfully measured the amplitude of the near-IR background fluctuations on arcminute scales, and our recent work using the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on New Horizons to measure the cosmic optical background. I will also highlight SPHEREx, a proposed spectrometric instrument designed to probe the inflationary history of the Universe and the evolution of galaxies.