We present a new time-series VI CCD photometry of the globular cluster NGC 6397, from which we obtained and analysed the light curves of 35 variables carefully identified in the cluster field. We assessed the membership of the variables with an astrometric analysis based on Gaia DR2 data. The cluster colour-magnitude diagram was differentially

The mass of a star is the most fundamental parameter for its structure, evolution, and final fate. It is particularly important for any kind of stellar archaeology and characterization of exoplanets. There exist a variety of methods in astronomy to estimate or determine it. In this review we present a significant number of such methods, beginning

Recent studies of warp kinematics using Gaia DR2 data have produced detections of warp precession for the first time, which greatly exceeds theoretical predictions of models. However, this detection assumes a warp model derived for a young population (few tens of megayears) to fit velocities of an average older stellar population of the thin disk

Aims: The path towards robust near-infrared extensions of stellar population models involves the confrontation between empirical and synthetic stellar spectral libraries across the wavelength ranges of photospheric emission. Indeed, the theory of stellar emission enters all population synthesis models, even when this is only implicit in the

We have explored the properties of a peculiar object detected in deep optical imaging and located at the tip of an H I tail emerging from Hickson Compact Group 16. Using multiband photometry from infrared to ultraviolet, we were able to constrain its stellar age to 58 ‒9 +22 Myr with a rather high metallicity of [Fe/H] = ‒0.16 ‒0.41 +0.43 for its

Context. In the central few degrees of the bulge of the Milky Way there is a flattened structure of gas, dust, and stars, known as the central molecular zone, that is similar to nuclear disks in other galaxies. As a result of extreme foreground extinction, we possess only sparse information about the (mostly old) stellar population of the nuclear