The aim of the SAURON collaboration, and the reason for building the instrument, is to study a representative sample of nearby ellipticals, lenticulars and bulges of early-type spirals, in order to measure their intrinsic shapes, velocity and metallicity distributions, and to gain insight into the relation between their stellar and gaseous.

Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and ground-based [O II] and [N II] images obtained in the period 1996-1999 reveal a complex, ionized optical nebula around the symbiotic binary CH Cyg extending out to 18" or 5000 AU from the central stars. The observed velocity range of the nebula, derived from long-slit echelle spectra, is 130 km s-1. In spite of its

We study the influence of gravitational microlensing on the spectral line profiles originating from a relativistic accretion disc. Using the Chen & Halpern model for the disc, we show the noticeable changes that microlensing can induce in the line shape when the Einstein radius associated with the microlens is of a size comparable to that of the

In May 2001 over 100 astronomers flew in from around the globe for an astronomical research conference on the central kiloparsec of starbursts and AGN, organised by the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes, and in fact the first major scientific conference organised wholly on La Palma.

The bright star delta Sco has been considered a typical B0-type object for many years. Spectra of the star published prior to 1990 showed no evidence of emission, but only of short-term line profile variations attributed to nonradial pulsations. Speckle interferometric observations show that delta Sco is a binary system with a highly-eccentric

An analysis of the collapse of the Twin Towers is carried on with the aid of simple mechanical laws. The motion of the collapse front is calculated in terms of geometric and energetic quantities.