NELIOTA: ESA's new NEO lunar impact monitoring project with the 1.2m telescope at the National Observatory of Athens

NELIOTA is a new ESA activity launched at the National Observatory of Athens in February 2015 aiming to determine the distribution and frequency of small near-earth objects via lunar monitoring. The objective of this 3.5 year activity is to design, develop and implement a highly automated lunar monitoring system, which will conduct an observing campaign for 2 years, starting in the Summer 2016, in search of NEO impact flashes on the Moon. The project involves: (i) a complete refurbishment of the 40 year old 1.2m Kryoneri telescope of the National Observatory of Athens, (ii) development of a Lunar imager for the prime focus with two fast-frame sCMOS cameras, and (iii) procurement of servers for data processing and storage. Furthermore, we have developed a software system that controls the telescope and the cameras, processes the images and automatically detects lunar flashes. NELIOTA provides a web-based user interface, where the impact events, after their verification and characterization, will be reported and made available to the scientific community and the general public. The novelty of this project is the dedication of a large, 1.2m telescope for lunar monitoring, which is expected to characterize the frequency and distribution of NEOs weighing as little as a few grams

Observations of the Hubble Deep Field South with the Infrared Space Observatory - I. Observations, data reduction and mid-infrared source counts

We present results from a deep mid-infrared survey of the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S) region performed at 6.7 and 15mum with the ISOCAM instrument on board the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO ). The final map in each band was constructed by the co-addition of four independent rasters, registered using bright sources securely detected in all rasters, with the absolute astrometry being defined by a radio source detected at both 6.7 and 15mum. We sought detections of bright sources in a circular region of radius 2.5arcmin at the centre of each map, in a manner that simulations indicated would produce highly reliable and complete source catalogues using simple selection criteria. Merging source lists in the two bands yielded a catalogue of 35 distinct sources, which we calibrated photometrically using photospheric models of late-type stars detected in our data. We present extragalactic source count results in both bands, and discuss the constraints that they impose on models of galaxy evolution, given the volume of space sampled by this galaxy population

Conditioned suppression or facilitation as a function of the behavioral baseline

Rats were exposed to a multiple schedule of reinforcement. During one component, a bar-press was followed by reinforcement only if it occurred between 15 and 20 sec after the previous response. This differential-reinforcement-of-low-rate (DRL) schedule produced a typical slow rate of responding. During the other component, reinforcement followed the first response to be emitted during limited periods of time which occurred at fixed intervals. These fixed-interval schedules with a limited hold produced higher response rates, described as `interval' or `ratio-like' behavior. Responding during the DRL component increased in frequency during a tone which ended with an unavoidable shock of low intensity, but decreased during the tone when the shock intensity was raised. The `interval' and `ratio-like' responding decreased in frequency during the tone at all shock intensities. Initial acceleration of the DRL responding appeared to be due to adventitious punishment of collateral behavior which was observed between the bar-presses. The more severe conditioned suppression during the fixed-interval components might be the result of the lower probability of reinforcement after any single response