We combine H_α and broad-band optical imaging and H_α velocity mapping over the face of the barred galaxy NGC 3359, obtained within the BARS programme on the Canary Island telescopes (Lourenso and Beckman, these proceedings). From the H_α image we have determined the positions, fluxes and diameters of a total of 547 HII regions, and computed their

The COMPTEL observations of the diffuse galactic 1.809 MeV emission attributed to the radioactive decay of 26Al have confirmed the diffuse nature of this interstellar emission line. One of the most significant features of the reconstructed intensity pattern is a flux enhancement in the direction of the Cygnus region. This region is fairly young and

IAUC 7542 available at Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams.

We report near-infrared and optical follow-up observations of the afterglow of the GRB 000418 starting 2.5 days after the occurrence of the burst and extending over nearly 7 weeks. GRB 000418 represents the second case for which the afterglow was initially identified by observations in the near-infrared. During the first 10 days its R-band

We present results from multi-band near-IR (J, H, and K) imaging of twelve BL Lac objects (z=0.055 to 0.774 for the 11/12 with well-determined redshifts) obtained with the du Pont 2.5m f/7.5 telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory. These AGN are a subset of the much larger BL Lac sample surveyed with HST, mostly in the R band. All twelve BL Lacs

NGC4321 is a two-armed grand design spiral galaxy in the Virgo Cluster. HI emission line data with 15 arcsecond resolution from the VLA map the velocity field of the hydrogen gas in the disk of NGC4321. In a grand design spiral galaxy, the presence of a spiral density wave causes deviations from circular rotation in the gas. The observed velocity