The Sloan Digitized Sky Survey (SDSS) and the proposed Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Evolution (SEGUE) offer a unprecedented stellar database with which to explore the properties of the thin disk, thick disk, and halo of the Galaxy. To make full use of the information contained in the available spectra and photometry, we require

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The QUEST (QUasar Equatorial Survey Team) Phase 1 camera has collected multibandpass photometry on a large strip of high Galactic latitude sky over a period of 26 months. This robust data set has been reduced and nightly catalogs compared to determine the photometric variability of the ensemble objects. Subsequent spectroscopic observations have

The observed cooling rate of hot gas in clusters is much lower than that inferred from the gas density profiles. This suggests that the gas is being heated by some source. We use an adaptive-mesh refinement code (FLASH) to simulate the effect of multiple, randomly positioned, injections of thermal energy within 50 kpc of the centre of an initially

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Oxygen abundances for a large sample of dwarf stars in the Galactic thin and thick disks are determined from a non-LTE analysis of the oxygen triplet lines at 777 nm. Kinematic criteria are employed to determine whether a star belongs to the thin or thick disk. Temperatures are obtained from photometric calibrations based on the infrared flux