Aims: We describe the discovery of an extremely wide pair of low-mass stars with a common large proper motion and discuss their possible membership in a Galactic halo stream crossing the Solar neighbourhood. Methods: In a high proper motion survey of the southern sky we used multi-epoch positions and photometry from the SuperCOSMOS Sky Surveys. New

In this contribution an Atmospheric Dispersion Corrector (ADC) developed for the FastCam project is presented. FastCam is a system based on 'lucky imaging' techniques for high spatial resolution, developed at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC). The use of a system to correct the atmosphere's effects is necessary to obtain a good optics

A big challenge in solar and stellar physics in the coming years will be to decipher the magnetism of the solar outer atmosphere (chromosphere and corona) along with its dynamic coupling with the magnetic fields of the underlying photosphere. To this end, it is important to develop rigorous diagnostic tools for the physical interpretation of

The purpose of the Active Phasing Experiment, designed under the lead of ESO, is to study new phasing technologies and to validate wavefront control concepts for Extremely Large Telescopes. The Active Phasing Experiment is currently tested in the laboratory at the ESO headquarters and will be tested on sky at a Nasmyth focus of a VLT unit telescope

Following the recent reports of activity (ATels #1660, #1664, #1665, #1666) we observed the field of IGR J00291+5934 with the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT). The observation was made at 4.9 GHz for about ten hours (from 2008-08-15 20:30 UT to 2008-08-16 06:30 UT). No source is detected at the reported position (ATel #364). We can place

This communication shows the design, layout, mounting and start-up of a high-resolution grating spectrograph for VIS-NIR at GREGOR 1.5m Solar Telescope (Observatorio del Teide, Tenerife, Canary Islands). The instrument will be used together with the Tenerife Infrared Polarimeter (TIP-II). As special characteristics of the design, the following can