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Essentially all galaxies within roughly 4 Mpc of the Milky Way are confined to a thin sheet-like structure, here referred to as the ``Local Sheet''. Our perspective from within a structure like those seen on much larger scales provides us with unique opportunities to search for environmental imprints on constituent galaxies. Clues about the nature

We report on the search for planets orbiting 46 nearby young stars performed at the State Observatory of Turingia (TLS) by means of a radial velocity survey. The aim of this program is to test the theories of formation/evolution of planetary systems. For 19(8) stars we can exclude planets with M sin i ≥ 1 M_J (5 M_J) and P ≤ 10 days; we find 1

Plans for future optical telescopes of diameter more than 10m are based on segmented mirrors, made up of hundreds or even thousands of segments. A challenge for these telescopes is the alignment in piston (cophasing) where phase differences between individual segments have to be reduced to a small fraction of the observing wavelength in order to

The Permanent All Sky Survey (PASS) will consist of arrays of wide angle CCD cameras, that will permanently survey the entire visible sky from several observing sites. Its major objectives are the detection of all giant-planet transits across bright stars and the detection and continuous tracking of any variable or transient phenomena in the full

A single 30 min high-resolution spectrum of the optical counterpart to the black hole candidate XTE J1817-330 (ATEL #714, #733) was acquired with the MIKE echelle spectrograph on the Magellan-Clay telescope at Las Campanas Observatory on Feb 20 2006 08:36 UT. In the blue (red), MIKE covered the wavelength range 3530-5070 (4830-9420) Angstrom with a