Nine months' seeing statistics at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos (ORM) are presented. Measurements were taken with a differential image motion monitor on top of a 5-m high tower. From the whole campaign the mean seeing is 0.76", the median value is 0.64" and 7% of the time the seeing is better than 0.3". The best seeing measured is 0

In this short paper, we study the photometric precision of stellar light curves obtained by the CoRoT satellite in its planet-finding channel, with a particular emphasis on the time scales characteristic of planetary transits. Together with other articles in the same issue of this journal, it forms an attempt to provide the building blocks for a

The Mg ii h & k lines are powerful diagnostics for studying the solar chromosphere. They have become particularly popular with the launch of the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) satellite, and a number of studies that include these lines have lead to great progress in understanding chromospheric heating, in many cases thanks to the

Most Howardite-Eucrite-Diogenite (HED) meteorites (analogues to V-type asteroids) are thought to originate from asteroid (4) Vesta. However some HEDs show distinct oxygen isotope ratios and therefore are thought to originate from other asteroids. In this study we try to identify asteroids that may represent parent bodies of those mismatching HEDs

The aim of this work is to investigate how photon noise and errors in the retrieval of solar magnetic parameters from measured Stokes profiles influences the extrapolartion of nonlinear force-free coronal magnetic fields from photospheric vector magnetograms. To do so we use a nonlinear force-free extrapolation code based on an optimization

The material surrounding accreting supermassive black holes connects the active galactic nucleus with its host galaxy and, besides being responsible for feeding the black hole, provides important information on the feedback that nuclear activity produces on the galaxy. In this Review, we summarize our current understanding of the close environment