We present CCD photometry in the Washington-system C and T1 passbands down to T1 ~ 22.5 mag in the fields of NGC 1697, SL 133, NGC 1997, SL 663, and OHSC 28, five mostly unstudied star clusters in the LMC. Cluster radii were estimated from star counts in appropriately sized boxes distributed throughout the entire observed fields. We perform a

The three open clusters Be 15, Be 80 and NGC 2192 have been observed using CCD UBV(RI)C photometry at the San Pedro Mártir Observatory, México within the framework of our open-cluster survey. The fundamental parameters of interstellar reddening, distance and age have been derived, and also the metallicity for NGC 2192 (solar metallicity has been

We present a detailed study of the X-ray energy and power spectral properties of the neutron star transient IGRJ17191-2821. We discovered four instances of pairs of simultaneous kilohertz quasi-periodic oscillations (kHz QPOs). The frequency difference between these kHz QPOs is between 315 and 362Hz. We also report on the detection of five

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