The paper describes the operations of ESA's Optical Ground Station (OGS) during the Lunar Laser Communications Demonstration (LLCD) experiment, performed in October and November 2013 with NASA's Lunar Atmospheric and Dust Environmental Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft. First the transmitter and receiver designs at the OGS telescope are described, which

In relation to the gas giants that have been observed, Jupiter is located relatively far from its star. Observing Jupiter as an exoplanet can provide information about what to expect when getting data from similar gas giants around other stars. Even though Jupiter's transmission spectrum can be difficult to observe when looking from the Earth, it

We present nuclear spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from 1 to 18 μm of a small sample of nearby, nearly face-on and undisturbed Seyfert galaxies without prominent nuclear dust lanes. These nuclear SEDs probe the central ˜35 pc of the galaxies, on average, and include photometric and spectroscopic infrared (IR) data. We use these SEDs, the

With archival and new Hubble Space Telescope observations, we have refined the space-velocity measurements of the stars in the central region of the remnant of Tycho's supernova (SN) 1572, one of the historical Galactic Type Ia supernova remnants (SNRs). We derived a proper motion for Tycho-G of (μαcos δ; μδ)J2000.0 = (-2.63; -3.98) ± (0.06; 0.04)

Motivated by the prediction of a high TeV luminosity we investigated whether the blazar 1ES 1727+502 (z = 0.055) is emitting very high energy (VHE, E > 100 GeV) γ rays. We observed the BL Lac object 1ES 1727+502 in stereoscopic mode with the two MAGIC telescopes for 14 nights between May 6th and June 10th 2011, for a total effective observing time

In order to probe the inside-out formation of the most massive galaxies in the Universe, we have explored the radial (0.1 ≲ R ≲ 8 kpc) variation of the spectral energy distribution of M87 from UV to IR. For this purpose, we have combined high-resolution data in 16 different bands. Our analysis indicate that the age of the stellar population of M87