Aims: The determination of reliable distances to planetary nebulae (PNe) is a major difficulty in the study of this class of objects in the Galaxy. The availability of new photometric surveys such as IPHAS (the INT/WFC photometric Hα survey of the northern Galactic plane) covering large portions of the sky provide an opportunity to apply the so

The important role of metallicity on massive star evolution and the combination of multi-object spectrographs and 10m class telescopes, have lead to numerous systematic studies of massive stars in Local Group galaxies. While color based quests of blue massive stars are relatively successful, they must be confirmed with spectroscopy and usually lead

An outstanding problem in Astronomy for the past 15+ years has been that the radii of low-mass, (M 1.0 M&sun;), main-sequence stars in eclipsing binary systems are consistently about 15% larger than predicted by theoretical models. The main cause is hypothesized to be rapid rotation due to binary spin-up, as all but one of the currently known

The Herschel Astrophysical Terahertz Large Area Survey (H-ATLAS) has uncovered a population of strongly lensed submillimeter galaxies (SMGs). The Zpectrometer instrument on the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) was used to measure the redshifts and constrain the masses of the cold molecular gas reservoirs for two candidate high-redshift lensed sources. We

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The parameters of the p-mode oscillations vary with solar activity. Such temporal variations provide insights for the study of the structural and dynamical changes occurring in the Sun's interior throughout the solar cycle. We present here a complete picture of the temporal variations of the global p-mode parameters (excitation, damping, frequency