Factors contributing to the scatter around the ridge-line period-luminosity relationship are listed, followed by a discussion how to eliminate the adverse effects of these factors (mode of pulsation, crossing number, temperature range, reddening, binarity, metallicity, non-linearity of the relationship, blending), in order to reduce the dispersion

We present new far-infrared (70-500 μm) Herschel Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) and Spectral and Photometric Imaging Receiver (SPIRE) imaging observations as well as new mid-IR Gemini/Thermal-Region Camera Spectrograph imaging (8.7 and 18.3 μm) and spectroscopy of the inner Lindblad resonance (ILR) region (R 2.5 kpc) of the

Integral field spectroscopy is a modern technique used in Astronomy to obtain simultaneous spectral information of all points in a bidimensional field of view. This communication presents the preliminary design of a multi-slit image slicer to be coupled to the spectrographs of the 4 meters aperture European Solar Telescope. This integral field unit

We present the discovery of planet-mass companions to two giant stars by the ongoing Penn State-Toruń Planet Search conducted with the 9.2 m Hobby-Eberly Telescope. The less massive of these stars, K5-giant BD+20 274, has a 4.2 MJ minimum mass planet orbiting the star at a 578 day period and a more distant, likely stellar-mass companion. The best

This paper investigates the distribution of linear polarization signals in the quiet-Sun internetwork using ultra-deep spectropolarimetric data. We reduce the noise of the observations as much as is feasible by adding single-slit measurements of the Zeeman-sensitive Fe I 630 nm lines taken by the Hinode spectropolarimeter. The integrated Stokes

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) uses a dedicated 300-fiber, narrow-band near-infrared (1.51-1.7 μm), high resolution (R~22,500) spectrograph to survey approximately 100,000 giant stars across the Milky Way. This three-year survey, in operation since late-summer 2011 as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III