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Some Be stars display important variability of the strength of the emission lines formed in their disk. This is notably the case of pi Aqr. We present here the recent evolution of the Be disk in this system thanks to spectra collected by amateur spectroscopists since the end of 2013. A large transition occurred: the emission linked to the Be disk nearly disappeared in January 2014, but the disk has recovered, with a line strength now reaching levels only seen during the active phase of 1950--1990. In parallel to this change in strength occurs a change of disk structure, notably involving the disappearance of the strong asymmetry responsible for the V/R modulation., Comment: accepted by New Astronomy

We determine the temporal evolution of the luminosity L(WD), radius R(WD) and effective temperature Teff of the white dwarf (WD) pseudophotosphere of V339 Del from its discovery to around day 40. Another main objective was studying the ionization structure of the ejecta. These aims were achieved by modelling the optical/near-IR spectral energy distribution (SED) using low-resolution spectroscopy (3500 - 9200 A), UBVRcIc and JHKLM photometry. During the fireball stage (Aug. 14.8 - 19.9, 2013), Teff was in the range of 6000 - 12000 K, R(WD) was expanding non-uniformly in time from around 66 to around 300 (d/3 kpc) R(Sun), and L(WD) was super-Eddington, but not constant. After the fireball stage, a large emission measure of 1.0-2.0E+62 (d/3 kpc)**2 cm**(-3) constrained the lower limit of L(WD) to be well above the super-Eddington value. The evolution of the H-alpha line and mainly the transient emergence of the Raman-scattered O VI 1032 A line suggested a biconical ionization structure of the ejecta with a disk-like H I region persisting around the WD until its total ionization, around day 40. It is evident that the nova was not evolving according to the current theoretical prediction. The unusual non-spherically symmetric ejecta of nova V339 Del and its extreme physical conditions and evolution during and after the fireball stage represent interesting new challenges for the theoretical modelling of the nova phenomenon., Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables, accepted for Astronomy and Astrophysics

The work is aimed at a study of the circumstellar disk of the bright classical binary Be star {\pi} Aqr. We analysed variations of a double-peaked profile of the H{\alpha} emission line in the spectrum of {\pi} Aqr that was observed in many phases during ~40 orbital cycles in 2004--2013. We applied the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) method to search for periodicity in the peak intensity (V/R) ratio. Doppler tomography was used to study the structure of the disk around the primary. The dominant frequency in the power spectrum of the H{\alpha} V/R ratio is 0.011873 day^-1 that correspond to a period of 84.2(2) days and is in agreement with the earlier determined orbital period of the system, Porb=84.1 days. The V/R ratio shows a sinusoidal variation phase-locked with the orbital period. Doppler maps of all our spectra show a non-uniform structure of the disk around the primary: a ring with the inner and outer radii at Vin~ 450 km/s and Vout~ 200km/s, respectively, along with an extended stable region (spot) at V_x ~ 225 km/s and V_y~100 km/s. The disk radius of ~ 65 Rsun = 0.33 AU was estimated assuming Keplerian motion of a particle on a circular orbit at the disk outer edge., Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, published in A&A

New estimate of the distances of 36 nearby galaxies is presented. It is based on the calibration of the V- and I-band Period-Lumi- nosity relations for galactic Cepheids measured by the HIPPARCOS mission. The distance moduli are obtained in a classical way. The statistical bias due to the incompleteness of the sample is corrected according to the precepts introduced by Teerikorpi (1987). We adopt a constant slope (the one obtained with LMC Cepheids). The correction for incompleteness bias introduce an uncertainty which depends on each galaxy. On the mean, this uncertainty is small (0.04 mag) but it may reach 0.3 mag. We show that the un- certainty due to the correction of the extinction is small (propably less than 0.05 mag.). The correlation between the metallicity and the morphological type of the host galaxy sug- gests us to reduce the application to spiral galaxies in order to bypass the problem of metallicity. We suspect that the adopted PL slopes are not valid for all morphological types of galaxies. This may induce a mean systematic shift of 0.1 mag on distance moduli. A comparison with the distance moduli recently published by Freedman et al. (2001) shows there is a reasonably good agreement with our distance moduli., Comment: Accepted for Astron & Astrophys. (2002) Cepheid database available at ftp://www-obs.univ-lyon1.fr via anonymous ftp. Directory: pub/base/CEPHEIDES.tar.gz

New estimates of the distances of 36 nearby galaxies are presented based on accurate distances of galactic Cepheids obtained by Gieren, Fouque and Gomez (1998) from the geometrical Barnes-Evans method. The concept of 'sosie' is applied to extend the distance determination to extragalactic Cepheids without assuming the linearity of the PL relation. Doing so, the distance moduli are obtained in a straightforward way. The correction for extinction is made using two photometric bands (V and I) according to the principles introduced by Freedman and Madore (1990). Finally, the statistical bias due to the incompleteness of the sample is corrected according to the precepts introduced by Teerikorpi (1987) without introducing any free parameters (except the distance modulus itself in an iterative scheme). The final distance moduli depend on the adopted extinction ratio {R_V}/{R_I} and on the limiting apparent magnitude of the sample. A comparison with the distance moduli recently published by the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project (HSTKP) team reveals a fair agreement when the same ratio {R_V}/{R_I} is used but shows a small discrepancy at large distance. In order to bypass the uncertainty due to the metallicity effect it is suggested to consider only galaxies having nearly the same metallicity as the calibrating Cepheids (i.e. Solar metallicity). The internal uncertainty of the distances is about 0.1 magnitude but the total uncertainty may reach 0.3 magnitude., Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, access to a database of extragalactic Cepheids. Astronomy & Astrophysics (in press) 2002