We report the discovery of an extraordinarily massive young cluster of stars in the Galaxy, having an inferred total initial cluster mass comparable to the most massive young clusters in the Galaxy. Using IRMOS, 2MASS, and Spitzer observations, we conclude that there are 14 red supergiants in the cluster, compared with five, in what was previously

Spectroscopic observations have been obtained of eighteen RR Lyrae stars (RRLs) belonging to the ``12.4 hr clump'', a prominent halo overdensity in the QUEST RRLs survey. Ten blue horizontal branch stars in the same region of space that had been measured by Sirko et al. (2004) were added to this sample. Thirteen of the 28 stars in the whole sample

A chemical evolution model of the Galaxy has been computed to reproduce the O/H gradients from Galactic HII regions. This model solves the C enrichment problem because it fits the C/H and C/O gradients and the C and O histories of the solar vicinity. The model is based on C yields dependent on metallicity (Z) owing to stellar winds. The C yields of

Simulation of encounters of disk galaxies (Barnes 2002, MNRAS, 333, 481) shows that the newly formed disks are often warped, many have rather complex kinematics, and roughly a quarter have counter-rotating or otherwise decoupled central components. Recent integral-field observations of the S0 galaxy NGC 7332 added to broad-band ground-based and

We report the results of a high temporal resolution spectroscopic monitoring of the flare star AD Leo. During 4 nights, more than 600 spectra were taken in the optical range using the Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) and the Intermediate Dispersion Spectrograph (IDS). We observed a large number of short and weak flares occurring very frequently (flare

We will present first results from a recent study of circum-nuclear star formation in nearby spiral galaxies, undertaken with the SINFONI integral-field spectrograph on the VLT. The observations yield R 1500 spectra covering both H- and K-band for a contiguous (8 x 8) sqarcsec field of view. Emission line maps reveal in unprecedented detail the