We carry out a systematic search for extremely metal-poor (XMP) galaxies in the spectroscopic sample of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data release 7 (DR7). The XMP candidates are found by classifying all the galaxies according to the form of their spectra in a region 80 Å wide around Hα. Due to the data size, the method requires an automatic

The ALHAMBRA photometric system was specifically designed to perform a tomography of the Universe in some selected areas. Although mainly designed for extragalactic purposes, its 20 contiguous, equal-width, medium-band photometric system in the optical wavelength range, shows a great capacity for stellar classification. In this contribution we

Although the stellar and substellar populations have been studied in various young and old open clusters, additional studies in clusters in the the age range from 5 to 100 Myr is crucial (e.g. to give more constrains on initial mass function variation with improved statistics). Among the open cluster candidates from recent studies, two clusters are

Although over centennial and greater timescales solar variability may be one of the most influential climate forcing agents, the extent to which solar activity influences climate over shorter time periods is poorly understood. If a link exists between solar activity and climate, it is likely via a mechanism connected to one (or a combination) of

We have performed a spectropolarimetric survey of the variable Mira star omicron Ceti along three pulsation cycles. We present those new data collected with the Narval instrument mounted on the Telescope Bernard Lyot (TBL) in Pic du Midi, France. We have detected time variable polarimetric signatures (on QUV Stokes spectra) associated with Balmer

We have made a search (to Y=19.6) of the UKIDSS Large Area Survey (LAS DR7) for objects detected only in the Y-band. We have identified and removed contamination due to solar system objects, dust specs in the WFCAM optical path, persistence in the WFCAM detectors, and other sources of spurious single source Y-detections in the UKIDSS LAS data-base