  We report on observations of comet 9P/Tempel 1 carried out before, during,
and after the NASA DEEP IMPACT event (UT July 4), with the optical
spectrometers UVES and HIRES mounted on the telescopes Kueyen of the ESO VLT
(Chile) and Keck 1 on Mauna Kea (Hawaii), respectively. A total observing time
of about 60 hours, distributed over 15 nights around the impact date, allowed
us (i) to find a periodic variation of 1.709 +/- 0.009 day in the CN and NH
flux, explained by the presence of two major active regions; (ii) to derive a
lifetime > ~ 5 x 10^4 s for the parent of the CN radical from a simple modeling
of the CN light curve after the impact; (iii) to follow the gas and dust
spatial profiles evolution during the 4 hours following the impact and derive
the projected velocities (400 m/s and 150 m/s respectively); (iv) to show that
the material released by the impact has the same carbon and nitrogen isotopic
composition as the surface material (12C/13C = 95 +/- 15 and 14N/15N = 145 +/-
20).
