As early as 10 Gyr ago, galaxies with more than 1011 M ☉ of stars already existed. While most of these massive galaxies must have subsequently transformed through on-going star formation and mergers with other galaxies, a small fraction (lsim0.1%) may have survived untouched until today. Searches for such relic galaxies, useful windows to explore

The morphology of galaxies can be quantified to some degree using a set of scale-invariant parameters. Concentration (C), asymmetry (A), smoothness (S), the Gini index (G), the relative contribution of the brightest pixels to the second-order moment of the flux (M 20), ellipticity (E), and the Gini index of the second-order moment (GM ) have all

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) is obtaining high resolution ( 22,500), high signal-to-noise (> 100) spectra in the 1510-1690 nm spectral region for 100,000 cool, predominantly post-main sequence stars. To ascertain the stellar atmospheric parameters and measure chemical abundances for the numerous chemical

The origin and formation of the Milky Way bulge remains poorly understood, in part because high quality observations of the bulge have generally been restricted to regions of low extinction. In the presence of dust, infrared observations confer a distinct advantage over those at optical wavelengths, and the advent of the Apache Point Observatory

We introduce LEGUS, a Hubble Space Telescope program which will provide a critical missing piece in our efforts to solve the star formation puzzle: a robust characterization of the links between star formation on two fundamental scales, those of individual young stars, stellar clusters and associations over parsec scales, and of galaxy disks over

The Treasury program LEGUS (HST/GO-13364) is the first HST UV Atlas of nearby galaxies, and is aimed at the thorough investigation of star formation and its relation with galaxy environment, from the scales of individual stars to those of ~kpc clustered structures. The 154-orbits program is obtaining NUV,U,B,V,I images of 50 star-forming galaxies