We have confirmed the detection of a surprising, and so far unique, absorption feature on a main-belt asteroid, 24 Themis. Our 2 to 4 micron reflectance spectra were obtained over 7 hours (84% of Themis’ rotational period) on January 23, 2008 UT, from NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility. All our spectra confirm the shape and depth of the 3.1 micron

Context: The structure and dynamics of small vertical photospheric magnetic flux concentrations has been often treated in the framework of an approximation based upon a low-order truncation of the Taylor expansions of all quantities in the horizontal direction, together with the assumption of instantaneous total pressure balance at the boundary to

Not Available

The Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (ORM) at La Palma (Canary Islands) is one of the two top pre-selected sites for hosting the future European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), the other ones are Ventarrones (Chile), Macon (Argentine) and Aklim (Maroc). Meteorological and seeing conditions are crucial both for the site selection and for

With the recovery of comet 103P/Hartley 2, the target of the EPOXI mission, we have begun the characterization of the nucleus necessary for the mission. Observations from past apparitions of this comet show that it typically begins activity while far from the sun, near r = 4 AU (about 450 days pre-perihelion). This makes obtaining information about

The preliminary results of a three-site CCD photometric campaign are reported. The δ Scuti variable V650 Tauri belonging to the Pleiades cluster was observed photometrically for 14 days on three continents during 2008 November. An overall run of 164 hr of data was collected. At least five significant frequencies for V650 Tauri have been detected.