Stellar variability types are assigned on the basis of lightcurve appearance, which often remains unchallenged without further observational evidence. VSOP (Variable Star One-shot Project) is a large international collaboration, which has so far obtained spectra of more than 800 stars during the past two years. Operationally this program is a

The UDP (User Defined Program) system is a scripting framework for controlling and extending instrumentation software. It has been specially designed for air- and space-borne instruments with flexibility, error control, reuse, automation, traceability and ease of development as its main objectives. All the system applications are connected through

We present a detailed optical study of the ultracompact X-ray binary 4U 0614+091. We have used 63 hr of time-resolved optical photometry taken with three different telescopes (IAC80, NOT, and SPM) to search for optical modulations. The power spectra of each data set reveals sinusoidal modulations with different periods, which are not always present

The Photodetector Array Camera and Spectrometer (PACS) is one of the three science instruments for ESA's far infrared and submillimeter observatory Herschel. It employs two Ge:Ga photoconductor arrays (stressed and unstressed) with 16 × 25 pixels, each, and two filled silicon bolometer arrays with 16 × 32 and 32 × 64 pixels, respectively, to

This communication reviews the participation of the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) in the design of the European Solar Telescope. Apart of being the coordinator institution of the whole project, and, as such, responsible for the project managing, the IAC leads several tasks like overall instrument definition or characterization of the

CoRoT (Convection, Rotation and planetary Transits) is a satellite mission led by CNES. CoRot has been successfully launched on December 27th of 2006. One of its goals is to discover new exo-planets using the transit method. It observes stars and sample their emission light every 512 seconds leading to observing runs of 12000 light curves over a 6