We report the optical detection of a faint star consistent with the known position of the 401 Hz transient accreting millisecond X-ray pulsar IGR J17498-2921 (ATel #3551, #3555, #3556, #3558, #3559, #3560, #3561, #3562, #3563, #3568, #3601, #3606). On 2011-08-25 and 2011-08-26 (MJD 55798.4 - 55799.5) we observed the field of IGR J17498-2921 with

HARMONI is a visible and near-IR integral field spectrograph, providing the E-ELT's spectroscopic capability at first light. It obtains simultaneous spectra of 32000 spaxels, at a range of resolving powers from R~4000 to R~20000, covering the wavelength range from 0.47 to 2.45 μm. The 256 × 128 spaxel field of view has four different plate scales

We subjected 106 new high-resolution spectra of the double-lined spectroscopic close binary varepsilon Lup, obtained in a time-span of 17 days from two different observatories, to a detailed study of orbital and intrinsic variations. We derived accurate values of the orbital parameters. We refined the sidereal orbital period to 4.55970d days and

We present time-resolved optical spectroscopy of V458 Vulpeculae (Nova Vul 2007 No. 1) spread over a period of 15 months starting 301d after its discovery. Our data reveal radial-velocity variations in the HeII λ5412 and HeII λ4686 emission lines. A period analysis of the radial-velocity curves resulted in a period of 98.09647 +/- 0.00025min (0

Near-Earth asteroid (NEA) 101955 (1999 RQ36; henceforth RQ36) is especially accessible to spacecraft and is the primary target of NASA's OSIRIS-REx sample return mission; it is also a potentially hazardous asteroid. We combine dynamical and spectral information to identify the most likely main-belt origin of RQ36 and we conclude that it is the

We analyse a high-resolution, fully cosmological, hydrodynamical disc galaxy simulation, to study the source of the double-exponential light profiles seen in many stellar discs, and the effects of stellar radial migration upon the spatiotemporal evolution of both the disc age and metallicity distributions. We find a `break' in the pure exponential