We report on optical spectroscopy of the black hole candidate MAXI J1305-704 (ATel #4024; #4030) using SALT and the Robert Stobie Spectrograph. On 2012 April 15 (20:40-23:00 UTC) and 16 (22:30-01:40 UTC) we obtained 2 hrs of continuous spectroscopy using a slit width of 0.6 arcsec, resulting in a wavelength coverage of 4050-5100 Angstrom and a

We present a light-curve analysis and radial velocity study of KOI-74, an eclipsing A star + white dwarf binary with a 5.2-d orbit. Aside from new spectroscopy covering the orbit of the system, we used 212 d of publicly available Kepler observations and present the first complete light-curve fitting to these data, modelling the eclipses and

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We provide manganese abundances (corrected for the effect of the hyperfine structure) for a large number of stars in the dwarf spheroidal galaxies Sculptor and Fornax, and for a smaller number in the Carina and Sextans dSph galaxies. Abundances had already been determined for a number of other elements in these galaxies, including α and iron-peak

A status report of the 4-years long ESO Large Program, aimed at monitoring and characterizing Main Belt Comets. The program is 50% completed. Some of the MBCs were observed active. In some cases, the dust is the aftermath of an impact.

Tadpole galaxies have a giant star-forming region at the end of an elongated intensity distribution. Here we use Sloan Digital Sky Survey data to determine the ages, masses, and surface densities of the heads and tails in 14 local tadpoles selected from the Kiso and Michigan surveys of UV-bright galaxies, and we compare them to tadpoles previously