We present Cu and Zn abundances for 38 FGK stars, mostly dwarfs, spanning a metallicity range between solar and [Fe/H] = -3. The abundances were obtained using Kurucz's local thermal equilibrium (LTE) model atmospheres and the near-UV lines of Cu I 3273.95 Å and Zn I 3302.58 Å observed at high spectral resolution. The trend of [Cu/Fe] versus [Fe/H]

FRIDA (inFRared Imager and Dissector for the Adaptive optics system of the Gran Telescopio Canarias) is designed as a diffraction limited instrument that will offer broad and narrow band imaging and integral field spectroscopy capabilities with low (R ~ 1,500), intermediate (R ~ 4,500) and high (R ~ 30,000) spectral resolutions to operate in the

Recent observations of galaxy luminosity profiles and dark matter simulations find luminosity and mass distributions characterized by central cusps rather than finite core radii. We introduce and implement a set of cusped ellipsoidal lens models that include limits similar to the Jaffe, Hernquist, η and NFW models and apply them to the

In February 2004 the Cute-SCIDAR instrument was installed at the 1m Jacobus Kapteyn telescope (JKT) for a systematic monitoring of the atmospheric turbulence at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (ORM). The proper knowledge of the atmospheric turbulence structure is crucial for optimising the efficiency of adaptive optics systems. SCIDAR

A new transient X-ray source was discovered in the 2011 August 26 Chandra ACIS observation of M31 (OBSID 12973), at RA = 00:42:11.37 DEC = +41:04:25.51. This system is likely to be a low mass X-ray binary with a black hole primary. The emission spectrum contained ~250 net source counts, and was well described by a power law with photon index 1.4 ±

We explore the possibility of discriminating dark energy models from the study of the growth of matter perturbations. For the sake of simplicity, instead of dealing with a great number of models, we have chosen a simple model of dark energy (px=ω0ρxγ, with ω0 0; px, and ρx being pressure and energy density), which is able to reproduce a great