Our Working Group (WG) studies massive, luminous stars, both individually and in resolved and unresolved populations, with historical focus on early-type (OB) stars, A-supergiants, and Wolf-Rayet stars. Our group also studies lower mass stars (e.g., central stars of planetary nebulae and their winds) which display features similar or related to

The solar activity cycle entered a prolonged quiet phase that started in 2008 and ended in 2010. This minimum lasted for a year longer than expected and all activity proxies, as measured from Earth and from Space, reached minimum values never observed before (de Toma, 2012). The number of spotless days from 2006 to 2009 totals 800, the largest ever

Aims: We revisit the scaling relations and star-forming histories of local elliptical galaxies using a novel selection method applied to the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR7. Methods: We combine two probability-based automated spectroscopic and morphological classifications of ~600 000 galaxies with z 0.25 to isolate true elliptical galaxies. Our

On March 27.2UT CRTS discovered transient CSS120327:110520-015205 in data taken by the Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) Schmidt telescope (Drake et al. 2012, ATel#4011). Upon inspection of SDSS DR8 data a faint host galaxy was found with magnitudes u=20.7, g=19.7, r=19.3, i=19.1 and z= 18.9.

Commission 41 was created at the VIIth IAU General Assembly in Zürich in 1948. From an inauspicious start-Otto Neugebauer was appointed the first President in his absence, but proceeded to express his conviction that ``an international organization in the history of astronomy has no positive function. . .my only activity during my term of service

Commission 12 of the International Astronomical Union encompasses investigations of the internal structure and dynamics of the Sun, mostly accessible through the techniques of local and global helioseismology, the quiet solar atmosphere, solar radiation and its variability, and the nature of relatively stable magnetic structures like sunspots