Vera Cooper Rubin, an icon of astronomy whose work revolutionized our understanding of the universe by confirming the existence of dark matter, passed away on December 25, 2016 at the age of 88. Vera had a lifelong love of the cosmos. “How could you possibly live on this Earth and not want to study the universe?” shewondered. Vera was a devoted champion of women in science and a beloved role mo...

Both the ADONIS (at ESO) and PUEO (at CFHT) adaptive optics systems have been in general use for several years, totalizing over 400 nights of scheduled observing time. They are routinely producing near-infrared diffraction-limited images under reasonable seeing conditions and a significant number of papers have now been published reporting astrophysical results obtained with adaptive optics. In...

The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement with Associated Universities, Inc. Adjunct Astronomer, Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD 21218

ADONIS is an adaptive optics user friendly instrument for the ESO 3.6-m telescope. The modal control technique is presented as a tool for optimizing the control of ADONIS. The perturbed wavefront is spread over a base of modes treated by the system in terms of their behavior with respect to the observing conditions (turbulence characteristics, anisoplanatic angle and star magnitude). This optim...

This paper outlines a new telescope operations paradigm that is intended to achieve low operating costs with high operating ef-ciency and high scientiic productivity. The paradigm is based on the existing Principal Astronomer approach used in conjunction with atis, a language for commanding remotely located automatic telescopes. This paper describes a telescope management system called the Asso...

in contemporary arabic literature recalling of quranic characters as the using of characters, events or historical periods in literary works are considered as the latest levels of connection between contemporary literature and his heritage. holy quran is one of the sources which its characters and stories have been used a lot in literature and this has resulted in the enrichment of literature. ...

This essay studies Moses Galeano, a Jewish scholar with ties to Crete and the Ottoman Sultan's court, who traveled to the Veneto around 1500. After describing Galeano's intellectual milieu, it focuses, first, on circumstantial evidence that he transmitted information central to the rise of Renaissance astronomy. Galeano knew of theories that strongly resemble portions of astronomy texts written...

We present V and I CCD photometry of suspected low-surface brightness dwarf galaxies detected in a survey covering ∼ 2.4 deg2 around the central region of the Dorado group of galaxies. The low-surface brightness galaxies were chosen based on their sizes and magnitudes at the limiting isophote of 26.0Vμ. The selected galaxies have magnitudes brighter than V ≈ 20 (MV ≈ −11 for an assumed distance...

The SNR candidate MF83 in M101 is coincident with a very luminous Xray source. Based on the high X-ray luminosity, it has been suggested that MF83 is a “hypernova remnant” requiring an explosion energy about two orders of magnitude higher than normal supernovae. We have analyzed high-quality ground-based and HST observations of MF83, and find that MF83 is a star formation region, consisting of ...