Magnetars are young neutron stars with very strong magnetic fields of the order of 1014-1015G. They are detected in our Galaxy either as soft γ-ray repeaters or anomalous X-ray pulsars. Soft γ-ray repeaters are a rare type of γ-ray transient sources that are occasionally detected as bursters in the high-energy sky. No optical counterpart to the γ

The light-gathering capacity and resolving power of the 1.5-meter aperture GREGOR telescope will provide solar observations of the full Stokes vector with high temporal, spectral and spatial resolution. As one of the first-light instruments, the GREGOR Fabry-Perot Interferometer (GFPI) is well suited for observations with adaptive optics (AO)

High-energy gamma-ray emission is theoretically expected to arise in tight binary star systems (with high mass loss and high-velocity winds), although the evidence of this relationship has proven to be elusive so far. Here we present the first bounds on this putative emission from isolated Wolf-Rayet (WR) star binaries, WR 147 and WR 146, obtained

Until April 2007 the Major Atmospheric Gamma ray Imaging Cherenkov (MAGIC) telescope used a 300 MSamples/s flash analog-to-digital converter (FADC) system to sample the shaped photomultiplier tube (PMT) signals produced by the captured Cherenkov photons of air showers. Different algorithms to reconstruct the signal from the read-out samples

Spitzer IR Array Camera (IRAC) mid-infrared photometry is presented for the globular cluster (GC) systems of the NGC 5128 (`Centaurus A') and NGC 4594 (`Sombrero') galaxies. Existing optical photometric and spectroscopic are combined with this new data in a comprehensive optical-to-mid-IR colour catalogue of 260 GCs. Empirical colour-metallicity

We report high-resolution spectroscopy of the moderately reddened (AV=3) early-type star Cernis 52 located in a region of the Perseus molecular cloud complex with anomalous microwave emission. In addition to the presence of the most common diffuse interstellar bands (DIBs) we detect two new interstellar or circumstellar bands coincident to within 0