The Hubble Space Telescope has provided the first clear evidence for weaker winds of metal-poor massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, confirming theoretical predictions of the metallicity dependence of mass-loss rates and wind terminal velocities. For lower luminosity O-type stars however, derived mass-loss rates are orders of magnitude

Soft X-ray transients (SXTs) provide the best evidence for the existence of stellar-mass black holes (BHs) with almost 20 confirmed systems based on dynamical studies. However, there is an estimated population of a few thousand dormant BH binaries, which slowly reveal themselves through secular X-ray outbursts. Therefore, new strategies aimed at

We summarize the current discussions towards astronomical time-series observations at Dome C and emphasize some near-future projects. We define time-series as the continuous process of data taking that takes advantage of the unique time windows and observing conditions at Dome C. We emphasize that most of the current approaches to time-series

Deep photometry around the Galactic globular clusters NGC 1851 and NGC 1904 obtained with the Wide Field Imager in the 2.2 m ESO telescope reveals a distinct main-sequence of a metal-poor stellar population, consistent with the presence of a very low surface brightness stellar system. The unveiled population might belong to an unknown tidal stream

We analyze spectropolarimetric observations of the penumbra of the NOAA AR 10953 at high spatial resolution (0.3 ″ ). The full Stokes profiles of the Fe i lines at 630.1 nm and 630.2 nm have been obtained with the Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) on board the Hinode satellite. The data have been inverted by means of the SIR code, deriving the

We describe the design of the near UV filter imager SuFi onboard Sunrise, which was successfully flown in the stratosphere in June 2009. During its five days flight SuFI captured the highest contrast images of solar granulation ever. SuFI is a diffraction limited filter imager with an effective focal length of 121m, working in 5 distinct wavelength