A promising approach to decrease the uncertainties in the initial--final mass relationship, which is still poorly constrained, is to study white dwarfs for which external constraints are available, for instance, white dwarfs in common proper motion pairs (CPMPs). Important information of the white dwarf can be inferred from the study of the

The Isaac Newton Telescope (INT) Photometric Hα Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS) is a 1800-deg2 CCD survey of the northern Milky Way spanning the latitude range -5° < b < + 5° and reaching down to r'~= 20 (10σ). Representative observations and an assessment of point-source data from IPHAS, now underway, are presented. The data obtained

With the dual aims of enlarging the list of extremely metal-poor stars identified in the Galaxy and boosting the numbers of moderately metal-deficient stars in directions that sample the rotational properties of the thick disk, we have used the 2.5 m Isaac Newton Telescope and the Intermediate Dispersion Spectrograph to carry out a survey of

Only less than 150 Wolf-Rayet galaxies are actually known. Many of them are dwarf or irregular galaxies, and some show close companion objects. Peculiar morphological features, like mergers or tidal tails connecting small stellar aggregates, are found in many cases. Therefore, we think that interaction could be an important mechanism that triggers

We present the first statistical study on the intrinsic three-dimensional (3D) shape of a sample of 83 galactic bars extracted from the CALIFA survey. We use the galaXYZ code to derive the bar intrinsic shape with a statistical approach. The method uses only the geometric information (ellipticities and position angles) of bars and discs obtained

We present a detailed comparison of the ionizing spectral energy distributions (SEDs) predicted by four modern stellar atmosphere codes, TLUSTY, CMFGEN, WM-basic and FASTWIND. We consider three sets of stellar parameters representing a late O-type dwarf (O9.5V), a mid-O-type (O7V) dwarf and an early O-type dwarf (O5.5V). We explore two different