Time resolved (40-sec resolution, ~6-hours per night), R-band photometry of the outbursting black hole candidate XTE J1118+480 (ATEL #383) was obtained with the European Space Agency, 1-m OGS telescope at the Spanish Observatorio del Teide (Tenerife) from 2005 Jan 21.01 to Jan 26.30. The average R-band magnitude displays a linear decay with a rate

We present measurements of the K I λ 7699 line from spectra of 19 late-type members of the αPersei cluster obtained with the Intermediate Dispersion Spectrograph at the Isaac Newton Telescope. These stars span a narrow range of Teff, from 5091 K to 4771 K, and a wide range of v sin i values (9 km s-1-170 km s-1). For a given star, we find

We present VR magnification ratios of QSO 0957+561 that are inferred from the GLITP light curves of Q0957+561A and new frames taken with the 2.56 m Nordic Optical Telescope about 14 months after the GLITP monitoring. To extract the fluxes of the two close components, two different photometric techniques are used, pho2comC and psfphot. From the two

We present new yields of 26Al from Wolf-Rayet stellar winds based on rotating stellar models which account well for numerous observed properties of massive stars. We study the impacts on the yields of a change of initial mass, metallicity and initial rotation velocity. We also consider the effects of a change of mass loss rates during the Wolf

We report the near-infrared (near-IR) identification of the likely counterpart to X1908+075, a highly absorbed Galactic X-ray source recently suspected to belong to the rare class of OB supergiant-neutron star binary systems. Our JHKs-band imaging of the field reveals the existence within the X-ray error boxes of a near-IR source consistent with an

As most if not all stars are born in stellar clusters the shape of the mass function of the field stars is not only determined by the initial mass function of stars (IMF) but also by the cluster mass function (CMF). In order to quantify this Monte-Carlo simulations were carried out by taking cluster masses randomly from a CMF and then populating