The Tarantula Survey is an ambitious ESO Large Programme that has obtained multi-epoch spectroscopy of over 1000 massive stars in the 30 Doradus region in the Large Magellanic Cloud. Here, we introduce the scientific motivations of the survey and give an overview of the observational sample. Ultimately, quantitative analysis of every star, paying

How the stellar mass of early-type galaxies is assembled remains an open question. Are the stars formed in situ, possibly triggered by merger events, or do they form in smaller systems before being added to the host galaxy through mergers? Using the SAURON sample of local early-type galaxies combined with dynamical modelling we searched for

We present a thorough literature study of the most-massive star, mmax, in several young star clusters in order to assess whether or not star clusters are populated from the stellar initial mass function (IMF) by random sampling over the mass range 0.01

Aims: Eleven new symbiotic stars have recently been discovered with IPHAS, the INT Hα survey of the Northern Galactic plane. The star IPHAS J190832.31+051226.6 was proposed as an additional candidate on the basis of the existing spectrum. Here, we investigate the nature of this source by means of additional observations. Methods: Photometric data

We present an abundance analysis based on high-resolution spectra of red-giant-branch (RGB) stars in the Galactic globular clusters NGC 6121 (M4) and NGC 6656 (M22). Our aim was to study their stellar population in the context of the multipopulation phenomenon recently discovered to affect some globular clusters. Analysis was performed for the

We used deep wide-field photometric observations to derive the fraction of binary systems in a sample of five high-latitude Galactic open clusters. By analysing the colour distribution of main-sequence stars, we derived the minimum fraction of binary systems required to reproduce the observed colour-magnitude diagram morphologies. We found that all