We are presently carrying out a northern hemisphere survey of the Galactic Hα emission. Our instrument, the Virginia Tech Spectral Line Imaging Camera (SLIC) utilizes a fast objective lens (f/1.2) with a cryogenically-cooled TK 512×512 CCD. A filter wheel in front of the lens allows us to select interference filters, including a narrowband Hα filter and a broader bandpass continuum filter in a line free part of the spectrum. The fast optics in combination with the low noise CCD result in sub-Rayleigh sensitivity at confusion limited levels. (1 Rayleigh = 106/4π photons cm–2 s–1 sr–1.) This corresponds to an emission measure sensitivity of ≈ 1 pc cm–6. Parameters of our system are given in Table 1.

The study of the context of LBV stars, that is close neighbourhood (companions) and spatial relationship to young objects such as cepheids. stellar associations, red supergiants. enriched OB supergiants. Hll regions. WR stars can provide useful clues on their true luminosity, their age thus eventually initial mass and evolutionary status.

Commission 53 met in August 12, 2009. Outgoing President Michel Mayor chaired the meeting, and there were several dozen members present, including incoming President Alan Boss, incoming Vice President Alain Lecavelier des Etangs. Commission 53 (C53) was founded at the 2006 Prague General Assembly of the IAU. After a period of 6 years, C53 will come up for renewal at the 2012 IAU General Assembly in Beijing, China. For the moment, more than 150 IAU members have asked to be members of C53 and few dozen non-IAU members having asked to be informed of the commission activity.

Boulders are ubiquitous on the surfaces of asteroids and their spatial and size distributions provide information for the geological evolution and collisional history of parent bodies. We identify more than 200 boulders on near-Earth asteroid 4179 Toutatis based on images obtained by Chang'e-2 flyby. The cumulative boulder size frequency distribution (SFD) gives a power-index of −4.4 ± 0.1, which is clearly steeper than those of boulders on Itokawa and Eros, indicating much high degree of fragmentation. Correlation analyses with craters suggest that most boulders cannot solely be produced as products of cratering, but are probably survived fragments from the parent body of Toutatis, accreted after its breakup. Similar to Itokawa, Toutatis probably has a rubble-pile structure, but owns a different preservation state of boulders.

Research in radio astronomy at the Ohio State University covers a wide range of astronomical and engineering phases. In this paper the principal topics currently under investigation are briefly discussed. Reference is made to more detailed papers or reports published within recent months or now in the press.

Non-gravitational perturbations, regardless being many orders of magnitude weaker than gravity, hold keys to fully understand the evolution of small Solar System bodies. This is because individual bodies, or their entire groups, manifest traces of a long-term accumulated changes by these effects.

For meteoroids and small asteroids in the 10 cm–10 km size range, the principal non-gravitational force and torque arise from an anisotropic thermal emission of the absorbed solar radiation. Related perturbations of the orbital and rotational motion are called the Yarkovsky and YORP effects.

We review the most important Yarkovsky- and YORP-driven processes, in the Main Asteroid Belt. These include: steady and size-dependent semimajor axis drift, secular changes of rotational period and obliquity, efficient transport towards low-order resonances, interaction with weaker higher-order resonances, captures in secular and spin-orbit resonances.

Many independent observations can be naturally interpreted in the framework of Yarkov-sky/YORP models, like cosmic ray exposure ages of meteorites, current population and size-distribution of near-Earth objects, the existence of unstable resonant asteroids or the structure of asteroid families.

Abundances in Galactic globular clusters are important for understanding Galactic chemical evolution and the formation of the Milk Way. 47 Tucanae (NGC 104) is a template metal-rich globular cluster ([Fe/H] ∼–0.7 dex). From the point of view of high resolution spectroscopy, there is still a lack of abundance analyses in the literature. In this work we present a detailed analysis carried out for 5 giants stars (12.10 < V < 14.30) of 47 Tucanae, using high resolution spectra (λ/Δλ∼60,000) with high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N > 200), obtained at the ESO VLT-UT2 8m telescope, equipped with the UVES spectrograph. Abundances of α- (O, Mg, Ca, Si, Ti), s- (Ba, Y, Sr) and r- (Eu) process elements are obtained.To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html

The subject of interstellar matter is one of the most active fields of astronomical research to-day. Observational information spans the full electromagnetic spectrum from long radio waves to gamma rays and includes cosmic-ray particles. Results of chemical research find as much application now as mathematical methods. Interstellar matter plays a leading role in galactic and extragalactic research, and contributes increasingly to stellar astronomy and in solar system studies.

We review the nearby debris disk structures revealed by multi-wavelength images from Spitzer and Herschel, and complemented with detailed spectral energy distribution modeling. Similar to the definition of habitable zones around stars, debris disk structures should be identified and characterized in terms of dust temperatures rather than physical distances so that the heating power of different spectral type of stars is taken into account and common features in disks can be discussed and compared directly. Common features, such as warm (~150 K) dust belts near the water-ice line and cold (~50 K) Kuiper-belt analogs, give rise to our emerging understanding of the levels of order in debris disk structures and illuminate various processes about the formation and evolution of exoplanetary systems. In light of the disk structures in the debris disk twins (Vega and Fomalhaut), and the current limits on the masses of planetary objects, we suggest that the large gap between the warm and cold dust belts is the best signpost for multiple (low-mass) planets beyond the water-ice line.

Increasing spatial resolution and contrast capabilities will make possible new direct detections of exoplanets, exozodis, and circumstellar disks. The Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI) has been engineered to sit at the combined focus of the Large Binocular Telescope's two 8.4m apertures. Both apertures are equipped with 672-actuator deformable secondary mirrors, the first of the next generation of “extreme” adaptive optics (AO) systems. We present an overview of the LBTI AO instrument suite and detail current on-sky performance.

Improved observing and data analysis strategies have initiated a considerable expansion of the empirical knowledge about the pulsations of OB stars. Possible correlations between physical parameters and associated pulsation characteristics are becoming more clearly perceivable. This starts to include the asteroseismologically fundamental areas of g-modes and rapid rotation. The β Cephei instability strip continues to be the only locus where radial pulsations occur (but apparently not in all stars located in that strip). Except for spectral types B8/B9 near the main sequence, where pulsations are hardly detected even at low amplitudes, any major group of stars in the Galaxy that are obviously not candidate pulsators still remains to be identified. However, the incidence and amplitudes of OB star pulsations decrease steeply with metallicity. The behaviour of high-luminosity stars is less often dominated by very few modes. In broad-lined stars the moving-bump phenomenon is more common than low-order line-profile variability. But its relation to nonradial pulsation is not clear. The beating of low-ℓ nonradial pulsation modes that have identical angular mode indices may be the clockwork of the outbursts of at least some Be stars. The physics of this episodic mass loss process remains to be identified.

This report is organized according to twelve subjects of interest in modern celestial mechanics. Emphasis is placed on the results of an exhaustive literature search in which assistance was received from several members of Commission 7. The impetus on celestial mechanics by space projects, by new observational techniques and by the use of high speed electronic computers continued to be of considerable importance. The fact that celestial mechanics became an experimental science is still too recent to be fully evaluated. The high accuracy of radar and laser observations, the new analytical and numerical techniques, the recent sophisticated statistical orbit determination methods and many other results achieved during the past three years suggest that celestial mechanics is an exploding field of science in which new and exciting results emerge. Celestial mechanics is influencing other fields of scientific endeavor and is intimately connected and embedded in almost all areas of modern astronomy and space research.

One of the greatest mysteries of nature is the absence of any trace of the present structure of the nearby universe in its relict 3K emission.

If we live in an evolving world (which evolves from extremely smooth to extremely structural), our radio telescopes should see observable temperature variations of 3K in practically any world model.

A satellite mission for accurate astrometry and multi-colour photometry is discussed, similar in principle to the ESA Hipparcos mission and here called the Roemer mission. The limiting magnitude will be about V = 18 mag while 13 mag is the limit of the present Hipparcos mission. Luminosities of stars up to 2 kpc away can be obtained, corresponding to a volume 10000 times larger than with Hipparcos. A mission of 5 years will provide an accuracy of 0.1 milli-arcsec at 12th magnitude for positions and parallaxes and 0.05 milli-arcsec for annual proper motions. This is achieved by a satellite using a mosaic of CCD detectors in the focal planes of two beam-combiner telescopes of 0.29 m aperture. The instrument is described and the expected performance with an input catalog of 400 million program stars is given.

In many recent papers dealing with computations of evolutionary sequences for massive stars with mass loss, the evolutionary status of Wolf- Rayet stars has been discussed. When one whishes to compare these theoretical computations with observations, it is of great importance to know the masses of Wolf-Rayet stars, which unfortunately are well determined only in a few cases. Estimates of the masses are provided by binaries with WR type components. I will report here preliminary results of spectrographic observations for 4 WN+OB systems, with new information about the masses of their components.

There has been a marked change in the past few years in the incidence of interest in stellar spectra. The great initial task of classification has attained its first objective—though the Henry Draper Extension, and other investigations are still progressing. Perhaps a million stars are still accessible to classification with existing instruments; but more and more time is being spent upon individual spectra, and upon theoretical investigations. In these fields progress has been very rapid, and only some of the more important results may be mentioned here.

Recent data taken with the 40-m telescope of the Owens Valley Radio Observatory at 20 GHz have confirmed the detections of the Sunyaev-Zel’dovich effect towards three clusters of galaxies, 0016+16, Abell 665 and Abell 2218. Rough measurements of the angular scale of the effect have also been made, and a comparison of these with the X-ray observations supports an isothermal model for the cluster gas.

During 1988–1990 Commission 7 has sponsored or co-sponsored several IAU conferences: Colloquium No. 109 “Application of Computer Technology to Dynamical Astronomy” (Gaithersburg, July 1988), Symposium No. 141 “Inertial Coordinate System on the Sky” (Pulkovo, October 1989), Colloquium No. 127 “Reference Frames” (Virginia Beach, October 1990), Colloquium No. 132 “Instability, Chaos and Predictability in Celestial Mechanics and Stellar Systems” (Delhi, October 1990). The colloquium No. 118 “Dynamics of Small Bodies in the Solar System” which was to be held in Nanjing in June 1989 had unfortunately to be postponed then cancelled. Other meetings of interest to the members of Commission 7 were the 2nd Alexander von Humbolt Colloquium on “Long Term Evolution of Planetary Systems” (Ramsau, March 1988), the Colloquium “Asteroids, Comets, Meteors III” (Uppsala, June 1989), the colloquium “Mécanique Céleste et Systèmes Hamiltoniens” (Luminy, May 1990) and the NATO Advanced Study Institute on “Predictability, Stability and Chaos in N-Body Dynamical Systems” (Cortina d’Ampezzo, August 1990).

For developing countries it is very important to derive maximum use of data obtained from their own telescopes. This is not only related to maximizing science returns on capital investment, but also to maximizing science output. In this paper we describe how we are utilizing software tools to realize this goal. This paper discusses the design and main features of our software tools, and planned future developments. The primary vehicle for general data interpretation is through various interactive techniques of data visualization. Our software employs an object oriented approach which facilitates data processing for experienced users as well as being easier to learn for novice users. This leads to greatly increased efficiency in every phase of data analysis. For developing countries the kind of software we are developing and the virtual observatory concept holds out the hope of advancing capability and efficiency in scientific research.