We present VR magnification ratios of QSO 0957+561 that are inferred from the GLITP light curves of Q0957+561A and new frames taken with the 2.56 m Nordic Optical Telescope about 14 months after the GLITP monitoring. To extract the fluxes of the two close components, two different photometric techniques are used, pho2comC and psfphot. From the two

We present new yields of 26Al from Wolf-Rayet stellar winds based on rotating stellar models which account well for numerous observed properties of massive stars. We study the impacts on the yields of a change of initial mass, metallicity and initial rotation velocity. We also consider the effects of a change of mass loss rates during the Wolf

We report the near-infrared (near-IR) identification of the likely counterpart to X1908+075, a highly absorbed Galactic X-ray source recently suspected to belong to the rare class of OB supergiant-neutron star binary systems. Our JHKs-band imaging of the field reveals the existence within the X-ray error boxes of a near-IR source consistent with an

As most if not all stars are born in stellar clusters the shape of the mass function of the field stars is not only determined by the initial mass function of stars (IMF) but also by the cluster mass function (CMF). In order to quantify this Monte-Carlo simulations were carried out by taking cluster masses randomly from a CMF and then populating

We obtained deep broad-band JHKs and narrow-band H2 and Brγ images of the northern part of the giant molecular cloud NGC 6334 containing three distinct centers of star formation (NGC 6334IN, E, and F), probably at different evolutionary stages. Preliminary results, including mid-IR images at 9.8 and 11.9 μm of the shell-shaped HII region NGC 6334E

There is considerable evidence that the circumnuclear regions of galaxies are intimately related to their host galaxies, most directly through their bars. There is also convincing evidence for relations between the properties of supermassive black holes in the nuclei of galaxies and those of their host galaxies. It is much less clear, however, how