We present the current status of our knowledge on the photospheric abundances of massive blue stars (with spectral types O-A) in the Milky Way and Local Group galaxies, and the implications of these for stellar and galactic structure and evolution. We also consider possible extensions of this project to observe individual stars in galaxies beyond

Not Available

The authors have shown how two extensive stellar spectral libraries of very high quality obtained with telescopes of small size can help us in determining the main properties of the stellar populations of the galaxies (e.g., age; metallicity; IMF; element ratios). New libraries with larger spectral ranges and wider stellar atmospheric parameters

Integral field spectroscopy has been obtained for the nuclear regions of three large, well-studied, early-type galaxies. From these spectra we have obtained line-strength maps for about 20 absorption lines, mostly belonging to the Lick system. An extensive comparison with multilenslet spectroscopy shows that accurate kinematic maps can be obtained

The evolution of exploding granules is studied by using a spatially as well as temporally highly resolved time series of white-light images of 80 minute duration. The results of this study show that the dynamics of exploding granules is strongly affected by their surroundings and that their appearance is closely related to the mesogranular flow

The planetary nebula NGC 2392 possesses an extremely unusual spectrokinematic morphology, characterized by several strange and elusive structures. In this paper, extensive narrowband imaging of the source is used to investigate the shell excitation structure, while [O III] and [S II] images are ratioed to provide fully sampled mapping of electron