Over recent decades there has been a proliferation of special-interest magazines dedicated to astronomy. In spite of the undoubted market for specialist feature articles on astronomy such articles appeal to a restricted sector of the general public and rarely appear in the daily or weekly press. I argue here that, apart from television documentary

We present the first results on the optical identification of 89 sources with S(0.5-2 keV)>=1.7x10^-14 erg s^-1 cm^-2 detected in eight ROSAT Position Sensitive Proportional Counter (PSPC) observations targeted on the second Lockman hole region. Because of the low Galactic HI column density towards this field [N_HI~(6-12)x10^19 cm^-2] the X-ray

Narrow band near infrared images of comet 1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp), where obtained in day-time, during April 1997, using the 1.52m Carlos Sanchez Telescope, at Teide Observatory (Tenerife, Spain), by the Comet Hale Bopp European Team. The comet was observed continuously for up to 11 hours hours each day on a total of 15 days. This allows us to obtain a

Aims: Previous studies have found that the Galactic rotation velocity-metallicity (V-[Fe/H]) relations for the thin and thick disk populations show negative and positive slopes, respectively. The first Gaia data release includes the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS) information, which we use to analyze the V-[Fe/H] relation for a strictly

Aims: Previous studies have found that the Galactic rotation velocity-metallicity (V-[Fe/H]) relations for the thin and thick disk populations show negative and positive slopes, respectively. The first Gaia data release includes the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS) information, which we use to analyze the V-[Fe/H] relation for a strictly

The distance, star formation history and global properties of the Local Group dIrr galaxy SagDIG are derived based on an [I-(V-I)] colour-magnitude diagram of ~ 1550 stars. A distance of 1.06+/- 0.10 Mpc is obtained from the I magnitude of the TRGB. This corresponds to 1.17 Mpc to the barycenter of the Local Group and 1.34 to M 31, being DDO 210