Towards the end of the last decade, the international astronomical community realised that exploitation of the new generation of 8-10-m class telescopes would be hampered unless surveys of the sky with suitable depth were carried out. Deep surveys aimed at the study of distant galaxies require NIR imaging in order to cope with the cosmological

Naruki gave an explicit construction of the moduli space of marked cubic surfaces, starting from a toric variety and proceeding with blow ups and contractions. Using his result, we compute the Chow groups and the Chern classes of this moduli space.As an application we relate a recent result of Freitag on the Hilbert polynomial of a certain ring of

We present optical follow up observations of the long GRB 001007 between 6.14 hours and ~468 days after the event. An unusually bright optical afterglow (OA) was seen to decline following a steep power law decay with index α = -2.03 ± 0.11, possibly indicating a break in the light curve at t - t0 3.5 days, as found in other bursts. Upper limits

We present high signal-to-noise ratio integrated spectra of 24 star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), obtained using the FLAIR spectrograph at the UK Schmidt telescope. The spectra have been placed on to the Lick/IDS system in order to test the calibration of Simple Stellar Population (SSP) models. We have compared the SSP-predicted

A new mid-infrared array camera has been recently put in operation with the 2.1 m telescope of the OAN at San Pedro Martir, Mexico. Calibrated 8.7, 9.8 and 12.5 micron images of a number of ultracompact HII regions and other less massive young stellar objects were obtained during the first two scientific runs with this instrument. Photometry and

Sunrise is a light-weight solar telescope with a 1 m aperture for spectro-polarimetric observations of the solar atmosphere. The telescope is planned to be operated during a series of long-duration balloon flights in order to obtain time series of spectra and images at the diffraction-limit and to study the UV spectral region down to ≅200 nm, which