A lunar eclipse offers a unique opportunity to investigate the terrestrial atmosphere. A recent work (Pallé et al. 2009) has published the Earth’s transmission spectrum from 0.36 to 2.40 μm obtained during the partial lunar eclipse of August 16th 2008. We have set out to interpret the measured spectrum, and assess to what extent the conclusions can

Asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars are among the most important gas and dust polluters of the Universe. The latest AGB evolutionary models take into account dust production in the circumstellar envelope of these stars, starting from a detailed computation of the main physical processes and chemical surface variations occurring in this evolutionary

We investigate the abundance of galactic molecular hydrogen (H2) in the `Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments' (EAGLE) cosmological hydrodynamic simulations. We assign H2 masses to gas particles in the simulations in post-processing using two different prescriptions that depend on the local dust-to-gas ratio and the

A sequence of 633 high spatial resolution magnetograms and continuum images from SOHO MDI of NOAA AR 0330 is used to study moving magnetic feature (MMF) activity in the moat surrounding a mature leader sunspot. The time-averaged frame shows that the moat region is covered by a magnetic field that exhibits the same polarity distribution as that

We obtained very deep and high spatial resolution near-infrared images of the Orion Trapezium Cluster using the Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics Demonstrator (MAD) instrument at the VLT. The goal of these observations has been to search for objects at the very low-mass end of the IMF down to the planetary-mass regime. Three fields in the innermost

We analyze the propagation of waves in sunspots from the photosphere to the chromosphere using time series of co-spatial Ca II H intensity spectra (including its line blends) and polarimetric spectra of Si I λ10,827 and the He I λ10,830 multiplet. From the Doppler shifts of these lines we retrieve the variation of the velocity along the line of