I present a comparison between the Probability Density Functions of the magnetic field strength, inclination, azimuth, and filling factor determined at four different heliocentric angles in the quiet Sun internetwork. The data were acquired with the spectropolarimeter attached to the Solar Optical Telescope onboard the Hinode satellite. The signal

Stellar models generally use simple parameterizations to treat convection. The most widely used parameterization is the so-called mixing-length theory where the convective eddy sizes are described using a single number, α, the mixing-length parameter. This is a free parameter, and the general practice is to calibrate α using the known properties of

The design and later use of modern spectropolarimeters and magnetographs require a number of tolerance specifications that allow the developers to build the instrument and then the scientists to interpret the data accuracy. Such specifications depend both on device-specific features and on the physical assumptions underlying the particular

The observation of the polarization emerging from a rotating star at different phases opens up the possibility to map the magnetic field in the stellar surface thanks to the well-known Zeeman-Doppler imaging. When the magnetic field is sufficiently weak, the circular and linear polarization profiles locally in each point of the star are

The present work investigates the Collision Induced Absorption (CIA) bands of oxygen that occur at 1065 and 1270 nm from solar occultation data obtained with the space-borne spectrometer SCIAMACHY. The effort is motivated by the interest in these two strong CIA bands in atmospheric research and the paucity of data on them under realistic

With the goal of assembling a new generation of more realistic single stellar population (SSP) models, we have obtained magnesium abundances for nearly 80% of the stars of the widely employed MILES empirical spectral library. Additional spectroscopic observations of carefully selected stars have recently been obtained to improve the parametric