On a recent spectrogram of the planetary nebula NGC 6572 the authors have found He II 4686 clearly in emission. They review previous descriptions of the spectrum and conclude that He II 4686 is stronger than 20 years ago. They briefly discuss the possible implications of this result, and suggest a careful monitoring of several planetary nebulae.

The Variability of solar IRradiance and Gravity Oscillations (VIRGO) experiment contains two types of active cavity radiometers for monitoring of the solar constant, two three channel sunphotometers for the measurement of spectral irradiance at 335, 500 and 865 nm and a low resolution imager with 12 pixels. The main scientific objective is probing

The steep abundance gradient found by McCall, Shields, and Rybski (1981) in the Sbc galaxy NGC 3344 is confirmed by a measurement of the electron temperature in the outer H II region.

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A new empirical calibration of the (B-V) index versus the three fundamental stellar parameters T(eff), (Fe/H), and log g is presented whose range of validity is adequate to analyze the main sequence and turnoff regions of most of the stellar cluster systems. Significant systematic differences are found between this new calibration and previous ones

High resolution, high S/N spectra obtained using RETICON and CCD detectors are used to determine the abundances of Al, Si, Ca, Ni and Fe in 23 disc stars in the metallicity range -1.2 ⪉ [Fe/H] ⪉ +0.3. The authors have found overabundances, with respect to iron for Al (≡0.4), Si (≡0.3), and Ca (≡0.2) in stars between -1.2 ⪉ [Fe/H] ⪉ -0.5. The