A new thinned back-illuminated Loral CCD has been installed in Dolores during August 2006 to temporarily replace the old Loral CCD. This became necessary because of the serious problems which negatively affected the old CCD in the last ~2 years such as charge-transfer and random fluctuations of the R.O.N. mean level. The first tests revealed that the new CCD is not affected by the above problems; nevertheless it has much more cosmetic defects of the old CCD (see Figure 1). In particular, it...

An international team of astronomers has used DOLORES-TNG to study the physical properties of a compact group of starburst galaxies which is falling at a speed of 1700 km/s towards the centre the galaxy cluster Abell 1367. The group, which was discovered in 2002 and named "BIG", has the highest density of star forming objects ever observed in local clusters. It contains two giant galaxies, at least ten dwarf galaxies or extragalactic clouds of gas and over a billion solar masses of diffuse...

The new array control electronics of NICS have been succesfully installed during February 2006. The new system, called FASTI-NICS, is much more reliable and time-efficient than the previous one. It also solved the problems related to image persistency in dithered observations. Please refer to the NICS web page for information on the new features. FASTI-NICS is the very succesfull result of several years of work by the IR group of Arcetri, and in particular by C. Baffa, V. Biliotti, A....

Visible and near-infrared spectroscopic observations carried out on August 1st 2005 by a group led by the ING-IAC astronomer Javier Licandro 1 using the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG) and the William Herschel Telescope (WHT) simultaneously show that the recently discovered trans-neptunian object (TNO) 2005 FY9 is very similar to Pluto. Results have been published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics (Licandro et al., 2006, A&A, 445, 35L). 2005 FY9 is the third brightest known...