We have started a near-infrared spectroscopic study of the Veritas asteroid family. This family is of particular interest for several reasons: 1) This 8.2 million-year-old family contains fresh fragments of a primitive parent body (Nesvorney et al., 2005). 2) Interplanetary dust from the Veritas collision makes up over 25% of interplanetary dust

We have computed the Band Area Ratio (BAR) and Band I Center parameters, following the method by Cloutis et al. (1986) and Gaffey et al. (1993) for all the existent visible and near-infrared spectra of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), main belt asteroids (MBs) and meteorites (Duffard et al.2005). For the NEAs we have grouped observations from NEOSS (de

Aims:We present an analysis of high resolution spectra in the J band of five ultra cool dwarfs from M6 to L0. Methods: We make use of a new ab initio water vapour line list and existing line lists of FeH and CrH for modelling the observations. Results: We find a good fit for the Mn I 12 899.76 Å line. This feature is one of the few for which we

The Galactic foreground contamination in CMBR anisotropies, especially from the dust component, is not easily separable from the cosmological or extragalactic component. In this paper, some doubts will be raised concerning the validity of the methods used to date to remove Galactic dust emission in order to show that none of them achieves its goal

The Observatorio Astronómico Nacional at San Pedro Mártir is located at 31°02'40''N and 115°28'00''W on the summit of the Sierra San Pedro Mártir on the Baja California peninsula, Mexico, at 2800 m above sea level. The results of more than three decades of site characterization work are summarized. These cover the following aspects: weather, cloud

The site selection for the future European Large Telescope (E-ELT) is a key issue within the European proposal funded by the European Union (EU), within the ``ELT design study'' proposal. The organization, working scheme and baseline frameworks are reviewed. For the definition of the working package WP12000 ``Site Characterization'', important use