Related papers: A new calibration for the Blue Horizontal Branch

Previous spectroscopic analyses of Blue Horizontal Branch (BHB) stars in six globular clusters revealed too low masses in four clusters when compared to canonical evolutionary theory, while the masses of the BHB stars in NGC 6752 and M 5…

Blue supergiant stars can be exceptionally bright objects in the optical, making them prime targets for the determination of extragalactic distances. I describe how their photometric and spectroscopic properties can be calibrated to provide…

Surface Brightness Fluctuations (SBFs) are one of the most powerful techniques to measure the distance and to constrain the unresolved stellar content of extragalactic systems. For a given bandpass, the absolute SBF magnitude \bar{M}…

Theoretical integrated broad-band colors ranging from far-UV to near-IR have been computed for old stellar systems from our evolutionary population synthesis code. These models take into account, for the first time, the detailed systematic…

We evaluated new colour-transformations for the Sloan photometry by 224 standards and used them to revise both the equations for photometric parallax estimation and metallicity calibration cited by Karaali et al. (2003). This process…

We present wide field JHKs photometry of 16 Galactic globular clusters located towards the Galactic bulge, calibrated on the 2MASS photometric system. Differential reddening corrections and statistical field star decontamination are…

We present an empirical method to derive photometric metallicity, reddening and distance to old stellar populations by using a few major features of the Red Giant Branch (RGB) in near IR color magnitude diagrams. We combine the observed RGB…

We study the photometric properties of stars in the data archive of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the prime aim being to understand the photometric calibration over the entire data set. It is confirmed that the photometric…

Blue horizontal-branch (BHB) stars are old, low-mass, metal-poor stars that serve as important tracers of the Galactic halo structure, kinematics, and evolution.Understanding their binary properties provides key insights into their…

We present a new method for measuring the mean age of old/intermediate stellar populations in resolved, metal-poor ($\rm \langle[Fe/H]\rangle \lesssim -1.5$) galaxies using only the morphology of the horizontal branch (HB) and an estimate…

The determination of stellar metallicity and its gradient in external galaxies is a difficult task, but crucial for the understanding of galaxy formation and evolution. The color of the Red Giant Branch (RGB) can be used to determine…

We present mean horizontal branch absolute magnitudes and iron abundances for a sample of 39 globular clusters. These quantities were calculated in an unprecedented homogeneous fashion based on Fourier decomposition of ligt curves of RR…

We discuss a 175 deg^2 spectroscopic survey for blue horizontal branch (BHB) stars in the Galactic halo. We use the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) to select BHB candidates, and find that the 2MASS…

We have measured the CH G band (CH(G)) index for evolved stars in the globular cluster M3 based on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectroscopic survey. It is found that there is a useful way to select red giant branch (RGB) stars from…

The horizontal branch (HB) morphology of globular clusters (GCs) is mainly described by metallicity. The fact that some clusters with almost the same metallicity exhibit different HB demonstrates that other parameters are at work. We…

We present coordinates and available photometric information (either from previous or recent broadband UBV observations, and near-infrared photometry from the 2MASS Point Source Catalog) for 12056 stars (11516 of which are unique)…

We present the results of a pilot Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging study of the host galaxies of ten quasars from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Reverberation Mapping (SDSS-RM) project. Probing more than an order of magnitude in BH and…

We examine the use of surface brightness fluctuations (SBF) for both stellar population and distance studies. New V-band SBF data are reported for five Fornax cluster galaxies and combined with literature data to define a new V-band SBF…

We present an analysis of the many possible methods for simulating and analysing colour-magnitude diagrams, with application to studies of the field halo stellar populations of resolved galaxies. Special consideration is made to the…

We develop a method to calibrate u-band photometry based on the observed color of blue galactic halo stars. The galactic halo stars belong to an old stellar population of the Milky Way and have relatively low metallicity. The "blue tip" of…