The next time you plan a quiet evening under a salted sky, with hopes of bathing your eyes in the ancient light of a majestic star cluster, be sure that your sketching kit comes with you! A casual glance at these celestial marvels will not give you a decent appreciation for an object whose history and character are as unique as the fingerprints you

Few things attract newcomers to visual astronomy and set them up for frustration like the crisp, vivid photographs of galactic and planetary nebulae that amaze us and fuel our imagination. The actual views through a telescope are, of course, far more subtle, requiring patience and persistence to observe and appreciate. Although the details in these

Comets add a sense of surprise and freshness to the predictability and seeming timelessness of the visible cosmos. Some of these mists of dust and fl uorescing gas sail through the inner solar system at regular intervals, such as the famous comet 1P/Halley. Many other comets are discovered yearly as they make their first observed descent to our

We present the evolution of the luminosity size and stellar mass size relations of luminous (LV > 3.4×1010h70 -2L&sun;) and of massive (M★ >3×1010h70 -2M&sun;) galaxies in the last˜11 Gyr. We use very deep near infrared images of the Hubble Deep Field South and the MS1054-03 field in the Js, H and Ks bands from FIRES to retrieve the sizes in the

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We present results from our ongoing effort to understand the nature and evolution of nearby galaxies using the SAURON integral-field spectrograph. In this proceeding we focus on the study of the particular case formed by the interacting galaxies NGC5953 and NGC5954. We present stellar and gas kinematics of the central regions of NGC5953. We use a