Two teams of scientists and engineers at Max Planck Institut fuer Extraterrestrische Physik and at the European Southern Observatory have joined forces to design, build and install the Laser Guide Star Facility for the VLT. The Laser Guide Star Facility has now been completed and installed on the VLT Yepun telescope at Cerro Paranal. In this paper

Spectral observations of the 639.361-nm FeI line at the center of the quiet solar disk with high spatial (0.4″) and temporal (10 s) resolution are used to investigate the behavior of local 5-min oscillations over granules and intergranular lanes. The power of the 5-min oscillations in the upper photosphere (at heights of H ≈ 490 km) is higher the

In this paper we study how the normal fast modes of a coronal loop are modified by the addition of density structure along the loop axis. Using isobaric and thermal equilibria with different heating functions, a density profile for a loop is derived, and then its oscillatory modes are studied with techniques similar to those in our previous works

We report on ESO Very Large Telescope optical spectroscopy of 42 BL Lacertae objects of unknown redshift. Nuclear emission lines were observed in 12 objects, while for another six we detected absorption features due to the host galaxy. The new high signal-to-noise ratio spectra therefore allow us to measure the redshift of 18 sources. Five of the

OSIRIS (Optical System for Imaging and low Resolution Integrated Spectroscopy) is the optical Day One instrument for the 10.4m Spanish telescope GTC (Gran Telescopio Canarias). The instrument spectral range covers from 365 up to 1000 nm. One of the most important elements of OSIRIS is its two commercial ICOS ET100 wide field Fabry-Perot tunable

EMIR, currently entering into its fabrication and AIV phase, will be one of the first common user instruments for the GTC, the 10 meter telescope under construction by GRANTECAN at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Canary Islands, Spain). EMIR is being built by a Consortium of Spanish and French institutes led by the Instituto de Astrofisica