Throughout the Milky Way, molecular clouds typically appear filamentary, and mounting evidence indicates that this morphology plays an important role in star formation. What is not known is to what extent the dense filaments most closely associated w
ith star formation are connected to the surrounding diffuse clouds up to arbitrarily large scales. How are these cradles of star formation linked to the Milky Ways spiral structure? Using archival Galactic plane survey data, we have used multiple datasets in search of large-scale, velocity-coherent filaments in the Galactic plane. In this paper, we present our methods employed to identify coherent filamentary structures first in extinction and confirmed using Galactic Ring Survey data. We present a sample of seven Giant Molecular Filaments (GMFs) that have lengths of order $sim$100 pc, total masses of 10$^4$ - 10$^5$ M$_{odot}$, and exhibit velocity coherence over their full length. The GMFs we study appear to be inter-arm clouds and may be the Milky Way analogues to spurs observed in nearby spiral galaxies. We find that between 2 and 12% of the total mass (above $sim$10$^{20}$ cm$^{-2}$) is dense (above 10$^{22}$ cm$^{-2}$), where filaments near spiral arms in the Galactic midplane tend to have higher dense gas mass fractions than those further from the arms.
We present photometric and spectral observation for four novae: V2362 Cyg, V2467 Cyg, V458 Vul, V2491 Cyg. All objects belongs to the fast novae class. For these stars we observed different departures from a typical behavior in the light curve and spectrum.
Nova V2491 Cyg was discovered on April 10.72 UT 2008 (Nakano, 2008). Here we present spectrophotometric premises that V2491 Cyg can be a good candidate for recurrent nova (RNe). Its properties are compared to five well known RNe with red dwarf second
aries (U Sco, V394 Cra, T Pyx, CI Aql, IM Nor) and recently confirmed as recurrent nova V2487 Oph (Pagnotta et al.,2008). Photometric $U, B, V, R_C, I_C$ and moderate resolution (R$sim 1500$) spectral observations of V2491 Cyg were carried out in the Torun Observatory (Poland) between April 14 and May 20 2008.
