On a recent spectrogram of the planetary nebula NGC 6572 the authors have found He II 4686 clearly in emission. They review previous descriptions of the spectrum and conclude that He II 4686 is stronger than 20 years ago. They briefly discuss the possible implications of this result, and suggest a careful monitoring of several planetary nebulae.

We report Hubble Space Telescope observations of six gravitational lenses with the Advanced Camera for Surveys. We measured the flux ratios between the lensed images in seven filters from 8140 Å to 2200 Å. In three of the systems, HE0512-3329, B1600+434, and H1413+117, we were able to construct UV extinction curves partially overlapping the 2175 Å

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We present the first deep, optical, wide-field imaging survey of the young open cluster Collinder 359, complemented by near-infrared follow-up observations. This study is part of a large programme aimed at examining the dependence of the mass function on environment and time. We have surveyed 1.6 square degree in the cluster in the I and z filters

We present new high-resolution near-infrared observations in the J, H, and K bands, obtained to study the properties of Seyfert host galaxies. The data set consists of images in the three bands of practically the entire CfA sample of Seyfert galaxies, and K-band images of a control sample of nonactive, ``normal,'' galaxies, matched to the Seyfert

Context: Most current radial velocity planet search programs have concentrated on stars of one solar mass. Our knowledge on the frequency of giant planets and brown dwarf companions to more massive stars is thus rather limited. In the case of solar-like stars, the frequency of short-period brown dwarf companions and very massive planets seems to be