We report on the ongoing VLT Laser Guide Star Facility project, which will allow the ESO UT4 telescope to produce an artificial reference star for the Adaptive Optics systems NAOS-CONICA and SINFONI. A custom developed dye laser producing >10W CW at 589nm is installed on-board of the UT4 telescope, then relayed by means of a single mode optical

We have identified a new early T dwarf only 3.6 pc from the Sun, as a common proper motion companion (separation 1459 AU) to the K5V star varepsilon Indi (HD 209100). As such, varepsilon Indi B is one of the highest proper motion sources outside the solar system ( ~ 4.7 arcsec/yr), part of one of the twenty nearest stellar systems, and the nearest

The techniques and software tools developed for the reduction and analysis of ISO-CAM/PHOT data with the LARI method are presented. The method, designed for the detection of faint sources in ISO raster observations, is based on the assumption of the existence of two different time scales in the detectors' transient behaviour, accounting either for

The complete mid- to far-infrared continuum energy distribution collected with the Infrared Space Observatory of the Seyfert 2 prototype NGC 5252 is presented. ISOCAM images taken in the 3-15 μm show a resolved central source that is consistent at all bands with a region of about 1.3 kpc in size. Because of the lack of ongoing star formation in the

We study the influence of gravitational microlensing on the AGN Fe Kalpha line confirming that unexpected enhancements recently detected in the iron line of some AGNs can be produced by this effect. We use a ray tracing method to study the influence of microlensing in the emission coming from a compact accretion disc considering both geometries

A numerical method to compute cometary dust tail brightnesses has been developed. The method, analogous in many ways to the inverse Monte Carlo method proposed by Fulle (cite{Fulle89}), has been applied to red continuum images of comet C/1999 T1 McNaught-Hartley obtained by Lara et al. (cite{Lara}). The time and size dependence of the particle