The Italian astronomical community strengthened its presence on the island of La Palma after the opening of a new installation of 1000 square meters in San Antonio, Breña Baja. Starting from October 19th 2007, the new scientific center is officially the headquarters of the Fundación Galileo Galilei (FGG) - INAF (Fundación Canaria), the organization managing and running the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG). The new installation in Breña Baja was inaugurated by the commissioner of INAF...

Impressive near-IR images of Uranus and Jupiter by means of the adaptive optics system of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, AdOpt@TNG Impressive near-IR images of Uranus and Jupiter by means of the adaptive optics system of the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo, AdOpt@TNG. The feasibility test of closing the loop on up-to ~ 4arcsec extended sources was successful !An amazing result after the images of Neptune in the 2004 summer.   AdOpt@TNG closed loop on Uranus taking hi-resolution near-IR...

An international campaign of photometric observations using, among others, the TNG telescope has provided indirect evidence of the existence of a giant planet (about three times the mass of Jupiter) around a red giant star that has completely passed through its expansion phase. The planet's presence was discovered by studying how its gravitational pull on the star altered the timing of regularly spaced pulses observed from the star. The new planet (named V391 Pegasi b) is one of the more...

During the night between July 13th and 14th, 2007, in conjunction with the first light of the Grantecan (the spanish telescope Gran Telescopio Canarias) His Royal Highness the Prince of Asturias, Don Felipe de Borbón, has been guest observer at the TNG. After the First Light official ceremony, Don Felipe de Borbón, who is an amateur astronomer, visited the TNG, accompanied by Don Francisco Sánchez and Don Carlos Martínez, respectively director and vice-director of the Instituto de...

A new fully automatic particle counter has been installed at the TNG site. From the TNG Weather Panel web page everyone has access to the concentration of dust measured on the outside of the TNG dome. The particle counter is a Lasair II, model 310B, made by Particle Measuring System, Inc. (PMS, Inc. in the following) and it means an important upgrade as respect to the previous particle counter (Abacus TM 301, also from PMS, Inc.) that has been in operation at TNG since the year 2001. The...

A completely new acquisition system based on the new generation CCD controller, Acquisition Software, User Interface and a new thinned, back-illuminated, E2V 4240 CCD has been installed in Dolores during May 2007. This upgrade increases the performances of Dolores in terms of system reliability, image quality, readout noise and reading speed.   The reading time of the new ccd controller is now 4.45 µSec/pixel , i.e. about 4 times faster than with the previous controller. The gain is about 1...

(results highlighted in the 464-1, Mar II 2007, issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.) Accretion from dwarf satellite galaxies is one potential origin of the stellar halo of our galaxy, but the remnant cores of these galaxies have both ages and metallicity distributions that do not match those of the bulk of the halo population. Stars that have already been stripped from the outer regions of those galaxies might however have significantly different properties. This paper looks at the stars...