Isotropic and anisotropic pointing models

This paper describes an alternative approach for generating pointing models for telescopes equipped with serial kinematics, esp. equatorial or alt-az mounts. Our model construction does not exploit any assumption for the underlying physical constraints of the mount, however, one can assign various effects to the respective components of the equations. In order to recover the pointing model parameters, classical linear least squares fitting procedures can be applied. This parameterization also lacks any kind of parametric singularity. We demonstrate the efficiency of this type of model on real measurements with meter-class telescopes where the results provide a root mean square accuracy of 1.5?2 arcseconds.     

CCD Photometry of Very Young Open Clusters

We are developing a long term programme to determine abundances of peculiar stars, as a function of age, in open clusters with ages ≤ 5 × 10⁷ yr. A fundamental part will be to deduce the ages and physical properties of these clusters with higher accuracy than in previous studies. As part of this effort we present here CCD uvbyβ photometry of two open clusters, NGC 884 and NGC 869. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Perturbed Gylden Systems and Time-Dependent Delaunay-Like Transformations

We study the possibilities and limitations of the application of generalized Delaunay-like transformations (in the 6-dimensional phase space) and TR-like mappings (in the 8-dimensional, extended phase space) to perturbed two-body problems with a time-varying Keplerian parameter μ(t), that is, to Gylden-type systems. For the sake of theoretical completeness, both negative- and positive-energy motion (with nonstationary coupling parameter) are, in principle, considered. Our developments are intended to introduce canonical variables parallelling the classical ones of Delaunay and the Delaunay-Similar variables of Scheifele. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Thermally induced wind patterns in the Sahelian city of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso

The urban surface wind field in the dry-tropical city of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso was studied based on data collected at one urban and one suburban station during early dry season. An intra-urban thermal breeze, creating almost opposite wind directions at the two sites, was found during nights with high atmospheric stability. The high atmospheric stability suggests a decoupling of the surface wind layer from the layer above, allowing the wind system to develop due to the strong intra-urban temperature gradients in the city. Frequent temporary breakdowns of the thermal wind system were noticed, generally generating a turn in wind direction towards that of the regional wind, thus indicating a re-coupling with a stronger wind flow in the wind layer above.     

Comparative hydrochemistry of five nested catchments located in the upper part of the Barcés river watershed (A Coruña,NW Spain)

259 stream water and 21 bulk precipitation samples have been studied between April 2008 and December 2010 in order to assess baseline hydrochemical conditions in a rural area of NW Spain. Stream waters are related to five nested catchments (<10 km²) with apparent low mean residence times. Their hydrochemical characteristics are closely related to bulk precipitation although clear evidences of seasonal (flushing, dilution, sediment desorption, etc.), lithological (schist vs. granite substrate) and anthropogenic (land use, contamination) effects are also described.     

Natural and anthropogenic C2 to C6 hydrocarbons in the central-eastern Venezuelan atmosphere during the rainy season

The levels of low molecular weight hydrocarbons were measured at pristine sites and rural locations affected by hydrocarbon emissions from oil and gas producing fields in Venezuela. At the clean sites, lower concentrations of C₂ to C₆ alkanes were observed, whereas, in comparison with remotes sites, very much higher levels were measured at the polluted sites. Alkenes present relatively high concentrations, with isoprene being the most abundant, all over the study region. The main sources of alkenes are likely to be natural, mainly from vegetation. The levels of alkanes recorded at the clean sites and the alkene levels found everywhere in the region are in agreement with the values reported for other clean sites in the tropics. The increase of ozone production capacity due to the anthropogenic emissions of alkanes from oil and gas fields was estimated. Due to the presence in the atmosphere of important amounts of naturally emitted isoprene, ethene and propene, which makes a substantial contribution to the reactivity of the hydrocarbon mixture, a small increase (<5%) was estimated to occur in the capacity of the ozone production at a regional scale during the rainy season.     

Location,location, location: changes in the diversity of animal resources exploited by Tardiglacial humans in northern Spain

Prey diversity of Homo sapiens in north Iberia exhibited shifts associated with climate warming after the Last Glacial Maximum, as deduced from animal remains obtained from Upper Palaeolithic caves in Asturias (northern Spain). Significant association of prey diversity and river proximity was found during adverse climate conditions, indicating opportunistic predation. A high increase of prey diversity was found when small animals (including fish) were taken into account in archaeological records, highlighting the importance of this type of prey in Palaeolithic diets. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Performance enhancement of a GIS-based facility location problem using desktop grid infrastructure

This paper presents the integration of desktop grid infrastructure with GIS technologies, by proposing a parallel resolution method in a generic distributed environment. A case study focused on a discrete facility location problem, in the biomass area, exemplifies the high amount of computing resources (CPU, memory, HDD) required to solve the spatial problem. A comprehensive analysis is undertaken in order to analyse the behaviour of the grid-enabled GIS system. This analysis, consisting of a set of the experiments on the case study, concludes that the desktop grid infrastructure is able to use a commercial GIS system to solve the spatial problem achieving high speedup and computational resource utilization. Particularly, the results of the experiments showed an increase in speedup of fourteen times using sixteen computers and a computational efficiency greater than 87 % compared with the sequential procedure.