LIGHTS is an ultra-deep imaging survey that is 10 years ahead of the science to be done with the Vera Rubin Observatory. In this talk, I will update the current status of the survey with more than 25 nearby galaxies already observed with the LBT telescope in Arizona up to surface brightness ~31 mag/arcsec^2 in g and r bands. I will also discuss the

The 10.4m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) was designed to be a versatile telescope, able to serve a wide scientific community. To this aim, various focal stations have been equipped, including a Cassegrain, two Nasmyth foci, and four folded-Cassegrain stations. This allows an ambitious instrumentation plan to be developed. We present the latest

Recent studies show that in Europe we are losing women's talent in some key disciplines for the future, particularly those directly related to astronomy. In order to get more girls and young women interested in the so-called STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields, it is necessary to change the highly entrenched stereotypes

The properties of blue supergiants are key for constraining the end of the main sequence (MS) of massive stars. Whether the observed drop in the relative number of fast-rotating stars below ≈21 kK is due to enhanced mass-loss rates at the location of the bistability jump, or the result of the end of the MS is still debated. Here, we combine newly

Context. Blue supergiants (BSGs) are key objects for understanding the evolution of massive stars, which play a crucial role in the evolution of galaxies. However, discrepancies between theoretical predictions and empirical observations have opened up important questions yet to be answered. Studying statistically significant and unbiased samples of

Accurate modeling of galaxy distributions is paramount for cosmological analysis using galaxy redshift surveys. However, this endeavor is often hindered by the computational complexity of resolving the dark matter halos that host these galaxies. To address this challenge, we propose the development of effective assembly bias models down to small