The High Angular Resolution Monolithic Optical and Near-infrared Integral field spectrograph (HARMONI) is a first generation instrument designed for the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT). HARMONI offers operational versatility, enabling both seeing-limited (NOAO) operation and compensation for atmospheric optical turbulence using two systems: Single

The ESA PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) mission aims at the detection and characterisation (radii, mass, density, age) of terrestrial exoplanets in orbits up to the habitable zone around Sun-like stars. To achieve these goals, an optimised complementary Ground-based Observations Programme (GOP) is set up with the purpose to

In recent years, a technology developed between the 1950s and 1970s by the pioneering experiments of Hanbury Brown and Twiss has (re)emerged: the Stellar Intensity Interferometry (SII). Unlike amplitude interferometry, SII exploits a second-order effect that can be measured by correlating the light intensities at different detectors without the

The abundance of alpha and neutron-capture elements provide an important fossil signature in Galactic archaeology for tracing the chemical evolution of the Milky Way stellar populations. The combination with the astrometry and photometry from the Gaia data releases allow us to build an accurate time evolving chemodynamical picture of the Galaxy

Star formation is a vital phenomenon across all fields of astronomy, shaping our universe in all its vastness, from the small scale of exoplanets to the large scales of galaxies and beyond. There are nevertheless still many unknowns surrounding star formation because of its complexity. Spiral arms are important sites of star formation, yet in spite

At the edge of galaxies, in the lowest surface brightness regimes, lies the boundary where gas can collapse to form new stars. These regions remain largely unexplored due to the lack of very deep images that allow us to characterize the star-forming clumps at the edge of the discs. In this sense, we do not know whether stellar activity in these