Seminarium Teorii Względności i Grawitacji

In general relativity light propagation is affected by gravity, leading to the well-known effects of light bending, Shapiro delays and gravitational redshift. On top of that the results of observation of light by an observer are also affected by the special relativistic phenomena like the aberration or time dilation. All these effects influence the measurements of shape, parallax, redshift and position drift (proper motion) of distant objects. We show that all results of those measurements can be understood in terms of the kinematical variables, describing the motion of the observer and the emitter with respect to their local inertial frames, and certain functionals of the curvature along the line of sight. This opens up the possibility to probe the spacetime curvature directly using optical observations. Applications of the results include cosmology and numerical relativity.