To deepen our knowledge of the early history of the Milky Way, it is of particular interest to investigate the orbital and chemical properties of the most metal-poor stars, which are commonly associated with the oldest stars in our Universe. With the advent of astrometric (Gaia), spectroscopic (APOGEE, GALAH, LAMOST, Gaia-RVS), and photometric

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

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

Open clusters are groups of coeval stars sharing properties such as distance and metallicity, and they are key to understanding stellar evolution. We shed light on the evolution of open clusters with a special focus on the universality of the luminosity function. We applied an upgraded version of the convergent point technique on about 50 open

The number of globular clusters plays a fundamental role in understanding the early stages of galaxy formation. We know that the GC population of normal galaxies correlates with the amount of dark matter in these objects. Extending this analysis to the number of globulars in very low surface brightness galaxies is therefore key to understanding the

It has been 20 years since the classification of galaxy disk types observed in deep imaging was established. These classifications, which notably consist of pure exponential, truncated, and antitruncated, have significantly enriched our understanding of the structural diversity within galaxies. Using ultra-deep imaging, most spiral galaxy profiles