Within the framework of the European Space Agency (ESA) SILEX project, aimed at experimentally demonstrating the feasibility of inter-satellite optical communications links, an Optical Ground Station (OGS) has been built by ESA in the premises of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC, Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands)

For a complete understanding of the physical processes causing the photometric variability of pre-main sequence systems, simultaneous optical and near-IR observations are required to disentangle the emission from the stars and that from their associated circumstellar disks. Data of this sort are extremely rare and little systematic work has been

The nucleus of 51P/Harrington suffered a major splitting event in Autumn 2001 discovered by amateur José Manteca. The light curve and separation of the fragments is examined based on data from the observers collaborating in the Spanish language ``Cometas_Obs'' mailing list, including a number of pre-announcement observations. There is some

We report new non-linear pulsation models of the helium stars V652 Her and BX Cir. Linear theory has previously shown their pulsations to be due to iron-group bump instability. Recent high-resolution spectroscopic observations have provided high-precision measurements of their radial velocity curves and of their radii. Their masses remain less well

We analyze the observed properties of nested and single stellar bar systems in disk galaxies. The 112 galaxies in our sample comprise the largest matched Seyfert versus non-Seyfert galaxy sample of nearby galaxies with complete near-infrared or optical imaging sensitive to length scales ranging from tens of parsecs to tens of kiloparsecs. The

We present near-infrared 1.5-2.5μm moderate-resolution long-slit spectra of two Seyfert 1 galaxies (NGC 1097 and 1566), three Seyfert 2s (NGC 1386, 4945 and 5128) and one Seyfert 1.5 (NGC 3227), both parallel to an ionization cone or jet and perpendicular to it. The spectra are used to study the spatial extent of the line emission, integrated