The activities related to the preparation of the asteroseismic, photometric space mission COROT are described. Photoelectric observations, wide-field CCD photometry, uvbyβ calibrations, and further time series have been obtained at different observatories and telescopes. They have been planned to complete the COROT program in the direction of the

A new method for absolute polarimetric calibration of large telescopes is presented. The proposed method is highly accurate and is based on the calibration of a small subaperture, which is then extended to the full system by means of actual observations of an astronomical source. The calibration procedure is described in detail along with numerical

We report an outburst of a black hole X-ray binary, V4641 Sgr in 2004 July. We succeeded in performing time-series photometry during the outburst, which showed repetitive short flares having a timescale of 10 min. Even after the outburst, it remained active for 17 d, as observed after an outburst in 2002. In conjunction with a low X-ray flux, we

We investigate the structural, kinematical and spectrophotometric properties of `E+A' galaxies - those with strong Balmer absorption lines but no significant [OII] emission - using numerical simulations combined with stellar population synthesis codes. We particularly focus on the two-dimensional (2D) distributions of line-of-sight velocity

Following the recent report of a possible radio counterpart to the X-ray transient IGR J17098-3628 (ATEL #490), we re-investigated our Magellan I-band exposures obtained on 2005 April 9 UT (see ATEL #478). The frames show a point source located at R.A.(J2000)=17:09:45.93, DEC(J2000)= -36:27:58.2 in the 2MASS reference frame (0.2" uncertainty). This

In this paper we present photometric redshift estimates for a sample of X-ray selected sources detected in the wide-field ( 2 deg^2), bright [ f_X(0.5{-}8 keV)≈10-14 erg s-1 cm-2] XMM-Newton/2dF survey. Unlike deeper X-ray samples comprising a large fraction of sources with colours dominated by the host galaxy, our bright survey primarily probes