Indirect evidence from detailed chemical evolution studies shows that infall of low metallicity gas appears to have proceeded at a rather constant rate during the lifetime of the Galactic disk. We explore two possible implications: (a) the effect of an infalling high velocity cloud (HVC) on interstellar cloud stability leading to enhanced star

The code IAC-STAR is presented. It generates synthetic H-R and color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) and is mainly aimed at star formation history studies in nearby galaxies. Composite stellar populations are calculated on a star-by-star basis, by computing the luminosity, effective temperature, and gravity of each star by direct bilogarithmic

Coded Aperture System performances are defined by the geometry of the code, detector pixel geometry relationship and focal length. Physical Coded Aperture Systems deviate from the ideal ones on two basic aspects: uncertainties on pixel location and size coming form the manufacturing process and deviations from their theoretical transparency/opacity

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We describe a search for submillimeter emission in the vicinity of one of the most distant, luminous galaxies known, HerMES FLS3, at z = 6.34, exploiting it as a signpost to a potentially biased region of the early universe, as might be expected in hierarchical structure formation models. Imaging to the confusion limit with the innovative, wide

Following the discovery of the new X-ray transient XTE J1637-498 (Atel #1699), we obtained a short (nearly 1 ksec) observation using the Swift/XRT in PC mode on 2008-09-04 at 18:15 UT. We detected one relatively bright source within the ~6 arcminutes PCA error circle at a position of RA=16:37:02.995, Dec=-49:51:37 (J2000), with an estimated