The dust ejecta of Main-Belt Comet P/2010 A2 (LINEAR) have been observed with several telescopes at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma, Spain. Application of an inverse dust tail Monte Carlo method to the images of the dust ejecta from the object indicates that a sustained, likely water-ice-driven, activity over some eight

We present colour transformations from Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) photometric system to Johnson-Cousins system and to Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) system for late-type giants and vice versa. The giant star sample was formed using surface gravity constraints ({2 log g ≤ 3}) to Cayrel de Strobel et al.' s (2001) spectroscopic catalogue

The Small Magellanic Cloud is a crucial galaxy to understand many aspects of the formation and evolution of galaxies. We propose to collect deep photometry in sixteen fields located at galactocentric distances from R_gc=2 to 4 degrees, in order to obtain color- magnitude diagrams reaching the oldest main sequence turnoff stars with high signal-to

Understanding the assembly of the most massive galaxies is one of the most important problems in astronomy today. It is now feasible to identify the most massive galaxies out to z 2.5, yet we have just begun to probe their evolution. To address this, we propose to obtain deep NIRI NIR long-slit spectroscopy of a sample of 15 ultra-massive galaxies

We report the detection of 15 X-ray bursts with RXTE and Swift observations of the peculiar X-ray binary Circinus X-1 (Cir X-1) during its 2010 May X-ray re-brightening. These are the first X-ray bursts observed from the source after the initial discovery by Tennant and collaborators, 25 years ago. By studying their spectral evolution, we firmly

We present high-resolution echelle spectra of seven proximate damped Lyman α (PDLA) systems. The relative velocity separation of each PDLA from the background quasar is Δ V 3000 km s-1. Combining our sample with a further nine PDLAs from the literature we compare the chemical properties of the proximate systems with a control sample of intervening