As part of a high resolution (0.55Å) spectroscopic survey of southern Seyfert galaxies, we observed a number of objects in the Hα region. The main goal of this survey is to study the profiles of the narrow lines in Seyfert 1 and Seyfert 2 galaxies. As a by-product, one can search for and analyse weak broad components in Ha that sometimes show up when Seyfert 2 galaxies are observed with high resolution and high signal to noise. Such objects are usually classified as Seyfert 1.8 or 1.9. The search and detailed study of these objects is of great importance for characterizing the weak end of the luminosity function of active galactic nuclei (AGN). The observations were made with a two channel intensified Reticon at the Coude spectrograph of the 1.6m telescope at the Laboratorio Nacional de Astrofisica (CNPq/LNA).

Statistical distances to the known galactic symbiotic stars are derived from the calibration of the absolute K magnitude of galactic bulge symbiotic giants versus spectral type. The resulting space distributions of S, D and yellow symbiotic stars are studied.

In the present work we have computed the physical parameters and chemical abundances for 45 planetary nebulae (PN) in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) using the photoionization code CLOUDY, developed by Ferland (1993). CLOUDY is used as a subroutine in the code DIANA, developed by Elizalde & Steiner (1996), which minimises indices that measures the difference between the calculated and real nebula.

Context: we present a study of the central 200 pc of NGC 6951, in the optical and NIR, taken with the Gemini North Telescope integral field spectrographs, with resolution of ~ 0”.1 Methods: we used a set of image processing techniques, as the filtering of high spatial and spectral frequencies, Richardson-Lucy deconvolution and PCA Tomography (Steiner et al.2009) to map the distribution and kinematics of the emission lines. Results: we found a thick molecular disk, with the ionization cone highly misaligned.

High post-release survival, low dispersal and the recruitment of captive-reared individuals into the wild population are critical to the success of any reintroduction programme. Reintroducing a migratory species poses an additional challenge as success also depends on the return of captive-reared individuals to breeding grounds in subsequent years. We investigated the effects of seven husbandry and management factors on the return rate of captive-reared eastern loggerhead shrikes Lanius ludovicianus migrans and documented the recruitment of returning individuals. During 2004–2010, 564 juveniles were released in Ontario, Canada, as part of a field propagation and release programme and there were 27 confirmed sightings of returning birds during 2005–2011. Returning birds were significantly more likely to have been released in large groups of juveniles (9–10 birds) at 5.5 weeks post-fledging from the Carden field propagation site. Comparisons of the number of young fledged and survival to 2 weeks post-fledging revealed similar results for pairs comprising one captive-reared and one wild-reared individual and pairs comprising two wild individuals. These results highlight the contribution of captive-reared shrikes to the recovery of the wild population and the importance of monitoring outcomes and evaluating techniques.

Silicon wafers as obtained from the manufacturer are immersed in a large area argon/hydrogen plasma for surface cleaning. The plasma discharge is maintained between a heated cathode and the grounded process chamber at discharge voltages of about 30 V for which discharge currents up to 100 A can be chosen. In this regime, neither the chamber walls nor the substrates are sputtered. Chemical reactions at the wafer surface are assumed to be mainly stimulated by low energy electron bombardment. The etch rates for diamond-like carbon (DLC) on silicon wafers were determined for selected discharge parameters and compared with the previously obtained results for SiO2. It was found that 5 minutes in-situ cleaning prepares the silicon wafers for homoepitaxy at 500 °C and higher substrate temperatures, whereas a short anneal at 500 °C was necessary to obtain low temperature homoepitaxy at 300 °C on (100) and 400 °C on (111) silicon. This seems to be due to hydrogen passivation of silicon during the cleaning procedure.

Laser ablation of silicon and germanium was carried out in moderate vacuum with l00fs to 400fs pulses at 248nm and intensities up to 3x1013 W/cm2. Evidence for non-thermal material removal was found. Imaged multishot ablation patterns display the intensity dependent self-structuring effect, forming well-known columnar structures. It is shown that continued irradiation of these structures eventually results in comparatively clean ablation. An increase of ablation rate with depth was observed. The reason is an intensity enhancement inside the pits by reflective focussing to a level where bond-breaking takes place. Furthermore, it was noticed that ablation contours can be significantly improved by electrically grounding the target.

The crystal structures, microstructures and electrochemical properties of Al-doped lithium manganese oxide materials LiAl x Mn1−x O2 (0 ≤ x ≤ 0.1) prepared by solid state reactions have been investigated. A1 doping results in increased cation disorder in the orthorhombic polymorph of LiMnO2, and produces layered monoclinic LiMnO2 with an α-NaFeO2 type crystal structure. The formation of monoclinic LiAl x Mn1-x O2 confirms earlier observations by Chiang et al. [1,2]. A mechanism is proposed for the orthorhombic-monoclinic transformation, based on Li-Mn inversion in the orthorhombic structure. Al ions substitute in Mn sites in the monoclinic phase and give rise to microstrain in the [2 0 -l] planes. Microstructural analysis by scanning electron microscopy has revealed Al-deficient striations which may represent residual zones of orthorhombic phase. In cycling tests in Li button cells, increasing the amount of Al dopant extends the number of cycles required for the capacity to evolve to its maximum value, but results in increased stability of the capacity at 55 °C. The layered structure of the monoclinic materials is retained on the first cycle, but transforms to a spinel-type structure on extended cycling.

The Sunrise balloon-borne solar observatory consists of a 1m aperture Gregory telescope, a UV filter imager, an imaging vector polarimeter, an image stabilization system and further infrastructure. The first science flight of Sunrise yielded high-quality data that reveal the structure, dynamics and evolution of solar convection, oscillations and magnetic fields at a resolution of around 100 km in the quiet Sun. Here we describe very briefly the mission and the first results obtained from the Sunrise data, which include a number of discoveries.

The Honduran Emerald Amazilia luciae is endemic to dry forests of Honduras and currently recognised as ‘Critically Endangered.’ Here we present the first modern assessment of its distribution, ecology, and conservation, based partly on our rediscovery of the species in western Honduras and on our observations in three Honduran departments. We found that dry forests inhabited by the emerald differed in structure and species composition between eastern and western Honduras, where we observed emeralds in open-canopied deciduous thorn forests and closed-canopied semi-deciduous woodlands, respectively. We interpret these differences in light of the geological and anthropogenic origins of dry forests in Honduras, and discuss the implications of such origins for the conservation of dry forests. Although our findings expand the known distribution and population size of the species, its status as ‘Critically Endangered’ is warranted due to its restricted distribution in dry forest fragments and increasing human pressures on this habitat.

NGC 7582 is defined as a Starburst/AGN galaxy, since its optical and X-Ray spectra reveal both characteristics. In this work, we show the results of a stellar population modeling in a datacube taken with the Gemini South telescope. We found that ~ 90% of the light in the field of view is emitted by stars that are less than 1 billion years old. A strong burst occurred about ~ 6 million years ago and has nearly solar metallicity. We also found a Wolf-Rayet cluster.

With the development of modern technologies such as integral field units, it is possible to obtain data cubes in which one produces images with spectral resolution. Extracting information from them can be quite complex, and hence the development of new methods of data analysis is desirable. We briefly describe a method of analysis of data cubes (data from single field observations, containing two spatial and one spectral dimension) that uses principal component analysis to express the data in the form of reduced dimensionality, facilitating efficient information extraction from very large data sets. We applied the method, for illustrative purposes, to the central region of the LINER galaxy NGC 4736, and demonstrate that it has a type 1 active nucleus, which was not known before. Furthermore, we show that it is displaced from the center of its stellar bulge.

Stellar archeology of nearby LINER galaxies may reveal if there is a stellar young population that may be responsible for the LINER phenomenon. We show results for the classical LINER galaxies NGC 4579 and NGC 4736 and find no evidence of such populations.

NGC 7582 was identified as a starburst galaxy in the optical (Veron et al. 1981) but its X-ray emission is typical of a Seyfert 1 galaxy (Ward et al. 1978). We analyzed a datacube on this object obtained with the GMOS-IFU on the Gemini-South telescope. After a subtraction of the stellar component using the starlight code (Cid Fernandes et al. 2005), we looked for optical signatures of the AGN. We detected a broad Hα component (Figure 1) in the source where Bianchi et al. (2007) identified the AGN in an HST optical image. We also found a broad Hβ feature (Figure 2), but its emission reveals a extended source. We suggest that it is the light of the AGN scattered in the ionization cone. We propose that NGC 7582 is a Seyfert 1 galaxy. A number of other “hot-spots” and Wolf–Rayet features were also identified.