We summarise some recent results about nearby galactic bulges, relevant to their formation. We highlight a number of significant advances in our understanding of the surface brightness profiles, stellar populations, and especially the very centers of spirals. We also view our own Milky Way as if it were an external galaxy. Our main conclusions are

The formation of galactic discs and the efficiency of star formation within them are issues central to our understanding of galaxy formation. We have developed a detailed and versatile model of disc formation which combines the strengths of previous studies of isolated discs with those of hierarchical galaxy formation models. Disc structure is

We present new deep observations of "shell" structures in the halo of the nearby elliptical galaxy NGC 7600, alongside a movie of galaxy formation in a cold dark matter (CDM) universe. The movie, based on an ab initio cosmological simulation, shows how continuous accretion of clumps of dark matter and stars creates a swath of diffuse circumgalactic

Context. Studies of low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies in nearby clusters have revealed a sub-population of extremely diffuse galaxies with central surface brightness of μ0,g' > 24 mag arcsec-2, total luminosity Mg' fainter than -16 mag and effective radius between 1.5 kpc 23 mag arcsec-2. We classified the objects based on their appearance into

We collected photometrical and dynamical data for 73 low red-shift (z

Aims: Until recently, most high-resolution spectroscopic studies of the Galactic thin and thick discs were mostly confined to objects in the solar vicinity. Here we aim at enlarging the volume in which individual chemical abundances are used to characterise the thin and thick discs, using the first internal data release of the Gaia-ESO survey (GES