Context. Open clusters are ideal test particles for studying the formation and evolution of the Galactic disk. However, the number of clusters with information about their radial velocities and chemical compositions remains largely insufficient. Aims: We attempt to increase the number of open clusters with determinations of radial velocities and

We describe an ongoing project to migrate the emission-line analysis package nebular from its current environment, IRAF, to a modern programming environment where it can be used from command line, a local GUI, or the web. We are also updating the supporting atomic data where they have been superseded by superior calculations or measurements.

Advancements in infrared (IR) interferometry open up the possibility to spatially resolve active galactic nuclei (AGNs) on the parsec-scale level and study the circumnuclear dust distribution, commonly referred to as the "dust torus," that is held responsible for the type 1/type 2 dichotomy of AGNs. We used the mid-IR beam combiner MIDI together

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The outer Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) have been studied in order to unveil clues about its formation and evolution using both deep color magnitude diagrams and low resolution spectroscopy of red giant branch stars in several fields which span a galactocentric range from 3 to 9 kpc. Our results point to an outside-in evolution scheme in opposition

We report on optical photometry and spectroscopy of the black hole X-ray transient Swift J1910.2-0546/MAXI J1910-057 (Krimm at al. ATel #4139, Usui et al. ATel #4140). R-band photometry (time resolution 27s) over an interval of 3.1 hr was obtained using ALFOSC on the 2.5m Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) on the night of 21 July 2012. The light curve