With the goal of assembling a new generation of more realistic single stellar population (SSP) models, we have obtained magnesium abundances for nearly 80% of the stars of the widely employed MILES empirical spectral library. Additional spectroscopic observations of carefully selected stars have recently been obtained to improve the parametric

We present preliminary results obtained from the analysis of very deep echelle spectra of a dozen planetary nebulae with [WC] or weak emission lines (wels) central stars. The computed abundance discrepancy factors (ADFs) are moderate, with values lower than 4. In principle, no evidence of the H-poor metal enriched inclusions proposed by Liu et al.

We present results from a wide-area photometric survey of the Phoenix dwarf galaxy, one of the rare dwarf irregular/dwarf spheroidal transition-type galaxies (dTs) of the Local Group (LG). These objects offer the opportunity to study the existence of possible evolutionary links between the late- and early-type LG dwarf galaxies, since the

We report on the current status of the search for planetary nebulae (PNe) in the IPHAS survey, the 1800 square degree H-alpha survey of the Northern Galactic Plane carried out at La Palma Observatory. The first major installment of the ``IPHAS Catalogue of Extended Nebulae'' is presented. This includes a complete census of emission-line nebulae in

We present a theoretical calibration of a new metallicity diagnostic based on the Strömgren index m1 and on visual - near-infrared (NIR) colors to estimate the global metal abundance of cluster and field dwarf stars. To perform the metallicity calibration we adopt α-enhanced evolutionary models transformed into the observational plane by using

We report a multisite photometric campaign for the β Cep stars V2052 Oph and V986 Oph. 670 h of high-quality differential photoelectric Strömgren, Johnson and Geneva time-series photometry was obtained with eight telescopes on five continents during 182 nights. Frequency analyses of the V2052 Oph data enabled the detection of three pulsation