We discuss the effects of collisional enhancement of Balmer lines on the determination of the primordial helium abundance. To this aim, we present a photoionization model of the metal-poor extragalactic H 0 region SBS 0335-052. We show that the derived helium abundance (Y) of this H 0 region depends on the amount of collisional excitation affecting

In this paper we present the second and final part of a large and photometrically homogeneous CCD color-magnitude diagram (CMD) data base, comprising 52 nearby Galactic globular clusters (GGC) imaged in the V and I bands. The catalog has been collected using only two telescopes (one for each hemisphere). The observed clusters represent 75% of the

Photometric observations of 1620 Geographos in 1993 and 1994 are presented and, in combination with previously published data, are used to derive models of Geographos. We estimate that the sidereal period of rotation is 0.21763860 +/- 0.00000003 days (5^h13^m23.975^s +/- 0.003^s). The sense of rotation is retrograde. The ecliptic coordinates of the

We present a catalog of 2990 extended sources in a 1° × 1° area centered on M33 using the MegaCam camera on the 3.6 m Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. The catalog includes 599 new candidate stellar clusters, 204 previously confirmed clusters, 1969 likely background galaxies, and 218 unknown extended objects. We present ugriz integrated magnitudes of

The authors present simultaneous UBVRI and infrared JHKL light curves of the short-period RS CVn system ER Vul, and study both the mean level and depths of eclipses. They also point out some peculiar features, present in the light curves over time, which are frequently shown by other RS CVn short-period systems at about the same phase values

An improved error box of GRB 970815 has been reported very recently (Smith et al.1999). This error box is consistent with the decaying X-ray source detected by ROSAT, which strongly supports the source as the GRB X-ray afterglow. We report a re-analysis of the follow up observations performed in 1997 containing the improved RXTE error box. No