Earthshine is sunlight that has been reflected from the dayside Earth onto the dark side of the Moon and back again to Earth. In recent times, there has been a renewed interest in ground-based visible and near infrared measurements of the earthshine, as a proxy for exoplanet observations. Observations of the earthshine allow us to explore and

On the 28th of December, MAXI/GSC detected an X-ray outburst from the globular cluster NGC6440 (Atel #2360), which has continued to the present.

Regular observations by the All-Sky Monitor aboard the Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer satellite have yielded well-sampled light curves with a time baseline of over 10 years. We find that up to eight of the 16 brightest persistent low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs) show significant, possible sinusoidal, variations with periods of the order of 10 years. We

Environmental statistics provide a necessary means of comparing the properties of galaxies in different environments and a vital test of models of galaxy formation within the prevailing, hierarchical, LCDM cosmological model. We explore counts-in-cylinders, a common statistic defined as the number of companions of a particular galaxy found within a

SAX J2103.5+4545 is the Be/X-ray binary (BeX) with the shortest orbital period. It shows extended bright and faint X-ray states that last for a few hundred days. The main objective of this work is to investigate the relationship between the X-ray and optical variability and to characterize the spectral and timing properties of the bright and faint

Analyses of very accurate CoRoT space photometry, past Johnson V photoelectric photometry and high-resolution echelle spectra led to the determination of improved and consistent fundamental stellar properties of both components of AU Monocerotis. We derived new, accurate ephemerides for both the orbital motion (with a period of ) and the long-term