Associazione Romana Astrofili

157 FRASSO SABINO 42,22945555N 12,81150555E 465m s.l.m.

The Observatorio Astrofsico de Javalambre: current status and future developments

The Observatorio Astrofísico de Javalambre (OAJ) is a new Spanish astronomical facility particularly conceived for carrying out large sky surveys, making use of two unprecedented telescopes of unusually large fields of view (FoV): the JST/T250, a 2.55 m telescope of 3 deg FoV, and the JAST/T80, an 83 cm telescope of 2 deg FoV. After two years of project development, JAST/T80 is already installed at the OAJ undergoing the first performance tests, and JST/T250 is fully assembled in the factory awaiting for the completion of the optics. We here provide an overall description of the...

Tunable filter absorption line spectroscopy of the Galactic bar. Metallicity gradients

The stellar metallicity distribution of stars can be a very useful tool to constrain the chemical evolution models reproducing different formation scenarios for the Galactic bulge. However, classical spectroscopy of individual stars is observationally expensive, and the surveys done so far have been unsuccessful due to the low number statistics. Recently, the advent of tunable filter tomography has opened a new way to obtain low-resolution spectroscopy of large samples of stars. We present preliminary results on an on-going study to measure the stellar metallicity at two different...

T Pyx: towards a new paradigm for nova explosions

T Pyxidis is a recurrent nova which underwent explosions at semi-regular intervals of about 22 years between 1890 and 1966. On the 14th Apr 2011, it started its sixth (long overdue) known outburst. In this talk, I present a multi-site campaign aimed at the follow-up of this object in the optical regime with intermediate resolution spectroscopy and I summarize some of our findings which challenge some of the common understandings of novae. Our observations may actually imply that the two populations of novae (Fe II and He/N) suggested by te{wms92} are, in fact, a byproduct of the...

On variability in obscured and unobscured AGNs

Status of the OTELO project