Nitrogen lines of the N I lambda1134 and lambda1200 multiplets in the damped Lyalpha (DLA) galaxies at z_abs = 2.309, 2.827, and 3.025 toward the QSOs 0100+1300, 1425+6039, and 0347-3819, respectively, have been detected by means of high-resolution spectra (R ~ 2 x 10^4) obtained with 4 m class telescopes at ESO (La Silla, Chile) and the

The first results of HST NICMOS observations of BL Lacertae objects are presented. Selected target, observed through the F160W filter, are from the HST "snapshot" survey of BL Lacs (Urry, Scarpa et al. 1999), span redshifts up to z=0.6. Observations provide reliable color information for the host galaxy, which in all cases is fully resolved. The

GRO J0422+32 (= V518 Per) is a black-hole X-ray nova which went into outburst on August 5, 1992. Since then, we have been monitoring the decay light curve of the optical counterpart using the FLWO 1.2-m telescope. Following the steep optical decay of the primary outburst in April 1993, two mini-outbursts were observed with amplitudes of ~ 4 mag and

We have obtained a spectrum of the Na D lines of the Seyfert galaxy Mrk 595 with a signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) of about 30. The importance of this sightline is that this galaxy lies in a direction close to the highest column densities of the Cohen high-velocity (HV) stream, and hence represents the best opportunity of detecting this stream in

GT2318+620 is a variable radio source exhibiting a jet-like feature on both sides of an unresolved core (Taylor et al., Nature 351, 1991), and it is possibly associated with an UHURU X-ray source. A red 20th magnitude star coincident with the radio core was identified as the optical counterpart. Based on a neutral hydrogen absorption spectrum and

The Hubble constant can be measured from the time delay between pairs of components of a multiply-imaged quasar, depending only on the mass model and the distances to the lens and background source. For a well-determined lens model, H_0 is implicitly related to the observable parameters by H_0 propto sigma_nu^2 Delta tau^{-1}, where sigma_nu is a