To investigate the binary hypothesis in the formation of planetary nebulae, we have been doing long-term photometry and radial velocity (RV) monitoring of bright post-AGB stars which possess bipolar or ellipsoidal nebulae but no indication of a disk in their spectral energy distribution, indicative of a binary companion. RV’s are determined by cross correlating high-resolution spectra with a line mask. Stellar variability and companions both deform the cross correlation function (CCF) and induce periodic variations in the RV. To uniformly quantify the asymmetry of the CCF from a Gaussian, we propose to fit the CCF profile with a Gauss-Hermite series and determine all CCF parameters (RV, skewness, FWHM, and depth) in one single fit. We analyze the correlation and time series of these CCF parameters for V448 Lac and conclude that its RV variability is most likely due to stellar pulsation and not to an orbiting body.

It is shown that the diagnostics from an observed circularly polarized line in a rapidly rotating star are directly interpretable, not in terms of the observed Stokes V profiles, but in terms of its antiderivative with respect to wavelength (in velocity units if preferred). This also leads to a new mean-field diagnostic that is just as easily obtained as the standard “center of gravity” approach, and is less susceptible to cancellation if the line-of-sight field changes sign over the face of the star.

VO-KOREL is a web service exploiting the technology of the Virtual Observatory for providing astronomers with the intuitive graphical front-end and distributed computing back-end running the most recent version of the Fourier disentangling code KOREL.

The system integrates the ideas of the e-shop basket, conserving the privacy of every user by transfer encryption and access authentication, with features of laboratory notebook, allowing the easy housekeeping of both input parameters and final results, as well as it explores a newly emerging technology of cloud computing.

While the web-based front-end allows the user to submit data and parameter files, edit parameters, manage a job list, resubmit or cancel running jobs and mainly watching the text and graphical results of a disentangling process, the main part of the back-end is a simple job queue submission system executing in parallel multiple instances of the FORTRAN code KOREL. This may be easily extended for GRID-based deployment on massively parallel computing clusters.

The short introduction into underlying technologies is given, briefly mentioning advantages as well as bottlenecks of the design used.

I report new results from radio studies of fundamental constant evolution, using comparisons between (1) conjugate satellite OH lines, and (2) inversion and rotational lines.

In the framework of he ESO Large Program “First Stars”, high resolution (R=45000) high S/N ratio spectra have been obtained for a sample of Extremely Metal Poor Stars (EMP stars), 35 giants and 18 turnoff stars. Among them 37 have a very low metallicity: [Fe/H]< −2.9.

Jets from newly-formed stars plow into the surrounding ISM, creating nebulous regions known as Herbig-Haro (HH) objects. Signatures of C-type shocks have been found in many HH objects. Models of shock-excited 1720-MHz OH masers associated with SNRs suggest that the masers could be signposts of C-type shocks. We have conducted a 1720MHz survey towards a number of HH objects to see if any shock-excited masers occur in association with these objects. Some results of our search are reported. When present, the 1720-MHz OH line can occur as emission, absorption or as P Cygni profiles. OH mainline emission is found in many of our sources. We have identified several potential 1720-, 1665- and 1667-MHz OH masers.