Open star cluster M45, the Pleiades, is popularly known as "The Seven Sisters". However, it is well-known that this group of young and nearby stars is composed not by just seven stars, but by about one thousand of them. A recent study of this cluster has discovered the faintest and coolest known members known to date: they are the Pleiades' lesser sisters, a group of the low-mass objects known as brown dwarfs...

Calar Alto Observatory has enjoyed the visit of one of the teams of winners of the European Southern Observatory international contest "Catch a Star". Denitsa Georgieva, Rositsa Zhekova and Tanya Nikolova, with their professor Dimitar Kokotanekov, from Bulgaria, shared with us three nights of work...

The dark clouds of gas and dust that populate the space among the stars are not as dark as previosuly beleived. A recent study done at infrared wavelengths at Calar Alto Observatory, shows that some of these clouds do shine, and display beautiful extended emission most likely due to scattered ambient starlight. The authors of this study named this new light cloudshine...

AstraLux, a new, simple instrument developed at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, has demonstrated at Calar Alto its ability to register extremely sharp astronomical images, comparable in resolution to views obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope...