Four years after its announcement at SPIE, FLAMES, the VLT fibre facility, has been completed, integrated into the VLT observatory and commissioned. It has been in operation since February 2003. More than 250000 scientific (single) spectra have been obtained, which have enabled the on-sky performance of the instrument to be compared to the

A Camera Barrel, located in the OSIRIS imager/spectrograph for the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), is described in this article. The barrel design has been developed by the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Mexico (IA-UNAM), in collaboration with the Institute for Astrophysics of Canarias (IAC), Spain. The barrel is being manufactured by

All B, R, I and Hα images described in the paper are presented electronically, along with the Ks images from Paper I (Knapen et al., 2003MNRAS.344..527K). The images are in FITS format, with basic parameters like pixel scale and calibration described in the FITS headers. All images have been reduced to the equivalent of 1 second exposure time. The

We present optical and NIR (near infrared) follow up observations of the GRB 001109 from 1 to 300 days after the burst. No transient emission was found at these wavelengths within this GRB's (Gamma Ray Burst) 50 arcsec radius BeppoSAX error box. Strong limits (3σ) are set with: R ⪆ 21, 10.2 h after the GRB; I ⪆ 23, 11.4 h after the GRB; H ⪆ 20.7, 9

We report on our program for multiband photometry observations of Optical Transients of Gamma-Ray Bursts at the 152 cm telescope in Loiano. 40 Km south of Bologna, Italy. Observations in the four semesters starting on July 1st, 2001, were performed for 13 events and allowed positive detections for six of them.

Current astronomical measurements indicate that approximately 73% of the universe is made up of dark energy. Stochastically quantized self-interacting scalar fields can serve as suitable models to generate dark energy. We study a particular model where the scalar field theory underlying dark energy exhibits strongest possible chaotic behaviour. It