This paper studies the dependence of the Ca ii H line core brightness on the strength and inclination of the photospheric magnetic field, and on the parameters of convective and wave motions in a facular region at the center of the solar disc. We use three simultaneous data sets that were obtained at the German Vacuum Tower Telescope (Observatorio

Open clusters (OCs) are crucial for studying the formation and evolution of the Galactic disc. However, the lack of a large number of OCs analysed homogeneously hampers the investigations about chemical patterns and the existence of Galactocentric radial and vertical gradients, or an age-metallicity relation. To overcome this, we have designed the

The Baryon Acoustic Oscillation (BAO) feature in the power spectrum of galaxies provides a standard ruler to measure the accelerated expansion of the Universe. To extract all available information about dark energy, it is necessary to measure a standard ruler in the local, z 0.2, universe where dark energy dominates most the energy density of the

The UV-initiative Hubble Space Telescope Treasury survey of Galactic globular clusters provides a new window into the phenomena that shape the morphological features of the horizontal branch (HB). Using this large and homogeneous catalog of UV and blue photometry, we demonstrate that the HB exhibits discontinuities that are remarkably consistent in

This is the third installment of the Galactic O-Star Spectroscopic Survey (GOSSS), a massive spectroscopic survey of Galactic O stars, based on new homogeneous, high signal-to-noise ratio, R ˜ 2500 digital observations selected from the Galactic O-Star Catalog. In this paper, we present 142 additional stellar systems with O stars from both

We present GTC-10.4 m spectroscopy and multiband photometry of the faint (r ˜ 26) optical counterpart of the anomalous X-ray pulsar 4U 0142+61. The 5000-9000 Å spectrum - the first obtained for a magnetar - is featureless, allowing us to set an equivalent width upper limit EW 25 Å to the presence of emission lines in the H α region. Multiband