Imaging of the solar surface from ground based telescopes has achieved to be diffraction limited almost ten years ago, while diffraction-limited spectropolarimetry is, for obvious reasons of available flux, far from being reachable nowadays. Among the 1-meter class solar telescope currently in operation, THEMIS is the most specifically devoted to

Analysis of the Hanle effect in solar molecular lines allows us to obtain empirical information on unresolved, tangled magnetic fields at subresolution scales in the (granular) upflowing regions of the `quiet' solar photosphere. Here we show observations of scattering polarization in selected C_2 lines at increasingly closer distances to the solar

The structural parameters of the low surface brightness stellar host in Blue Compact Dwarf galaxies are often studied by fitting R1/n models to the outer regions of their radial profiles. The limitations imposed by the presence of a large starburst emission overlapping the underlying component makes this kind of analysis a difficult task. We

We present selected results from integral-field spectroscopy of 48 earlytype galaxies observed as part of the SAURON survey. Maps of the Hβ Fe5015, Mgb and Fe5270 indices in the Lick/IDS system were derived for each of the survey galaxies. The metal line strength maps show generally negative gradients with increasing radius roughly consistent with

We carry out a statistical analysis of galaxy pairs selected from chemical hydrodynamical simulations with the aim at assessing the capability of hierarchical scenarios to reproduce recent observational results for galaxies in pairs. Particularly, we analyse the effects of mergers and interactions on the star formation (SF) activity, the global

We explore the use of Integral Field Spectroscopy (IFS) for observing extrasolar planet transits. We show that IFS can improve the photometric accuracy in high S/N time series observations with respect to standard slit spectrophotometry. Ground based observations of HD209458b obtained with WHT + INTEGRAL during a transit have led to an accuracy in