We present optical and near-infrared colour maps of the central regions of bulges of S0 and spiral galaxies obtained with WFPC2 and NICMOS on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). By combined use of HST and ground-based data, the colour information spans a region from a few tens of pc to a few kpc. In almost all galaxies, the colour profiles in the

We present results on the study of 24 bulges of Sa galaxies observed with the integral-field unit SAURON at the William Herschel Telescope. Here we review some of the main features observed in our maps in terms of their kinematics and stellar populations, and unveil a rather complex picture in which the centers of spiral galaxies are made of

We present photometry for globular and open cluster stars observed with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). In order to exploit the over 100 million stellar objects with r

We present the results of our preliminary study of all known Galactic PNe (included in the Kerber 2003 catalog) which are detected by the AKARI/FIS All-Sky Survey as identified in the AKARI/FIS Bright Source Catalog (BSC) Version β-1.

We simulate the characteristics of the Galactic population of radio and gamma-ray pulsars using Monte Carlo techniques. At birth, neutron stars are spatially distributed with supernova-kick velocities in the Galactic disk and randomly dispersed in age back to 109 years. They are evolved in the Galactic gravitational potential to the present time.

Over the past years observations of young and populous star clusters have shown that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) appears to be an invariant featureless Salpeter power law with an exponent α=2.35 for stars more massive than a few Msolar. A consensus has also emerged that most, if not all, stars form in stellar groups and star clusters