With the recent discovery of a dozen dusty star-forming galaxies and around 30 quasars at z > 5 that are hyper-luminous in the infrared (μ L IR > 1013 L⊙, where μ is a lensing magnification factor), the possibility has opened up for SPICA, the proposed ESA M5 mid-/far-infrared mission, to extend its spectroscopic studies toward the epoch of

The software package ELSPEC/1 written at Trieste Astronomical Observatory for the automatic reduction of spectrograms digitized by a PDS 1010A microdensitometer is described and an example of the results obtained is shown. The package accepts spectrograms in the format of the Observatoire de Hauts Provence and operates on a HP 2100A minicomputer.

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The surface brightness fluctuations (SBF) method is a statistical method applied on image pixels in different bands. This contribution aims to distinguish between the observational (statistical) method and the theoretical (probabilistic) method based on stellar population synthesis and needed for the calibration of observational SBF. We find that

A prevalent but untested paradigm is often used to describe the prominence-cavity system: the cavity is under-dense because it is evacuated by supplying mass to the condensed prominence. The thermal non-equilibrium (TNE) model of prominence formation offers a theoretical framework to predict the thermodynamic evolution of the prominence and the

Prominence threads are expected to be cold plasma condensations in a long magnetic tube. Because of this density inhomogeneity along the magnetic field, the ratio of the fundamental transverse mode period to twice that of its first overtone, P 1/2P 2, must differ from 1. We investigate the dependence of this ratio on the equilibrium parameters of