Aims: We revisit the scaling relations and star-forming histories of local elliptical galaxies using a novel selection method applied to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR7. Methods: We combine two probability-based automated spectroscopic and morphological classifications of ~600 000 galaxies with z 0.25 to isolate true elliptical galaxies. Our

On March 27.2UT CRTS discovered transient CSS120327:110520-015205 in data taken by the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) Schmidt telescope (Drake et al. 2012, ATel#4011). Upon inspection of SDSS DR8 data a faint host galaxy was found with magnitudes u=20.7, g=19.7, r=19.3, i=19.1 and z= 18.9.

Commission 41 was created at the VIIth IAU General Assembly in Zürich in 1948. From an inauspicious start-Otto Neugebauer was appointed the first President in his absence, but proceeded to express his conviction that ``an international organization in the history of astronomy has no positive function. . .my only activity during my term of service

Commission 12 of the International Astronomical Union encompasses investigations of the internal structure and dynamics of the Sun, mostly accessible through the techniques of local and global helioseismology, the quiet solar atmosphere, solar radiation and its variability, and the nature of relatively stable magnetic structures like sunspots

Climate variability of the eastern part of the Mediterranean Sea during the last deglaciation has been reconstructed from a marine sediment core MD04-2722 (33°09 N; 33°49 E, 1780 m w.d.) retrieved in the Levant basin. A multi-proxy approach provided records of surface waters conditions and of detrital inputs to the core location through chemical

The complexities of ultracool atmospheres are best confronted by observations of ultracool dwarfs (UCDs) with well known physical properties (luminosity, mass, Teff, log(g), [M/H]), so-called ``benchmark objects.'' We present two discoveries from a new WISE+2MASS search for benchmark wide companions to Hipparcos and Gliese stars. This survey