The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope for Polarimetry (BLASTPol) is a suborbital mapping experiment designed to study the role played by magnetic fields in the star formation process. BLASTPol uses a total power instrument and an achromatic half-wave plate to modulate the polarization signal. During its first flight from

We report on the performances measured at room temperature, before and after a cryogenic cooling cycle, of a set of NIR Volume Phase Holographic Gratings (VPHGs) manufactured at the Miguel Hernández University (UMH, Elche, Spain) aimed at their use in astronomical instrumentations. VPHGs are novel optical components which can replace standard ruled

The Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre (OAJ) is a new astronomical facility located at the Sierra de Javalambre (Teruel, Spain) whose primary role will be to conduct all-sky astronomical surveys. The OAJ facility will have two wide-field telescopes: the JST/T250; a 2.55-m telescope with a 3° diameter field of view (FoV), and the JAST/T80; an 0

The radial profiles of the age, metallicity and α/Fe enhancement of the stellar populations in the bulge-dominated region for a sample of eight spiral galaxies with low surface-brightness stellar discs and bulges are presented. Almost all the sample bulges are characterised by young stellar populations, solar α/Fe enhancements and metallicities

Spectrum of LSR J0745+2627 obtained using XShooter at VLT, Paranal Observatory. No smoothing has been applied to this spectrum. (1 data file).

The composition of the most primitive solar system condensates, such as calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions (CAIs) and micron-sized corundum grains, show that short-lived radionuclides (SLR), e.g., 26Al, were present in the early solar system. Their abundances require a local or stellar origin, which, however, is far from being understood. We present