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This tutorial is devoted to extending an existing catalogue with data taken elsewhere, either from CDS Vizier or Simbad database. As an example, we used the so-called 'Spectroscopic Survey of Stars in the Solar Neighborhood' (aka. S4N, Allende Prieto et al. 2004) in order to retrieve all objects with available data for the set of fundamental stellar parameters effective temperature, surface gravity and metallicity. Then for each object in this dataset we query Simbad database to retrieve the projected rotational velocity. This combines Vizier and Simbad queries made using Python astroquery module. The tutorial covers remote database access, filtering tables with arbitrary criteria, creating and writing your own tables, and basics of plotting in Python., 6 pages, 2 figures + python code (tutorial corrected in {\S}4 [remark in red]) - see also: http://goo.gl/mr9wZp

We study relations between the X-ray luminosity, orbital period and absolute near-infrared magnitude of persistent low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs). We show that often optical and near-infrared spectral energy distribution of LMXBs can be adequately described by a simple model of an accretion disc and a secondary star reprocessing X-ray emission of a central compact object. This gives us an evidence that using an X-ray luminosity and an absolute infrared magnitude of a persistent LMXB one can make reliable estimate of its orbital period. Using a sample of well-known LMXBs, we have constructed a correlation of L_X, P_orb and M_K values which can be approximated by a straight line with the RMS scatter at the level of ~0.3 mag. Such a correlation, being to some extent an analogous to the correlation, found by van Paradijs & McClintock 1994, might be helpful for future population studies especially in the light of forthcoming surveys of the Galaxy in X-ray and infrared spectral domains., 9 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

Nowadays, Virtual Observatory standards, resources, and services became powerful enough to help astronomers making real science on everyday basis. The key to the VO success is its entire transparency for a scientific user. This allows an astronomer to combine "online" VO-enabled parts with "offline" research stages including dedicated data processing and analysis, observations, numerical simulations; and helps to overpass one of the major issues that most present-day VO studies do not go further than data mining. Here we will present three VO-powered research projects combining VO and non-VO blocks, all of them resulted in peer-reviewed publications., Comment: Proceedings of the ADASS-XIX conference, 4 pages, 1 figure, to appear in ASP Conf. Series

An astronomical complex intended to detect optical transients (OTs) in a wide field and follow them up with high time resolution investigation is described., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures. To be published in "Il Nuovo Cimento", Proceedings of the 4th Rome Workshop on Gamma-Ray Bursts in the Afterglow Era, eds. L. Piro, L. Amati, S. Covino, B. Gendre

Automated search for star clusters in J,H,K_s data from 2MASS catalog has been performed using the method developed by Koposov et. al (2008). We have found and verified 153 new clusters in the interval of the galactic latitude -24 < b < 24 degrees. Color excesses E(B-V), distance moduli and ages were determined for 130 new and 14 yet-unstudied known clusters. In this paper, we publish a catalog of coordinates, diameters, and main parameters of all the clusters under study. A special web-site available at http://ocl.sai.msu.ru has been developed to facilitate dissemination and scientific usage of the results., 9 pages, 3 tables, 5 figures, accepted to Astronomy Letters