Traditionally the Earth's reflectance has been assumed to be roughly constant, but large decadal variability, not reproduced by current climate models, has been reported lately from a variety of sources. We compare here the available data sets related to Earth's reflectance, in order to assess the observational constraints on the models. We find a

The expansion in the plane of the sky of the nebula around the symbiotic nova He2-147 has been resolved by means of two HST WFPC2 [NII] images taken 3 years apart. The information on the tangential expansion is complemented by the velocities along the line of sight, obtained through VLT integral-field spectroscopy. This combination of data reveals

We present simultaneous time-resolved photometry and spectroscopy of the eclipsing cataclysmic variable 1RXS J020929.0+283243 (ATel #652). Our data indicate that it is a new AM Herculis (i.e. polar) system. Unfiltered photometry (25-sec time resolution) was performed on 2005 November 8 UT at the 2.56-m Nordic Optical Telescope on La Palma. The

Recent works (Steeghs & Casares 2002, Casares et al. 2003, Hynes et al. 2003) have demonstrated that Bowen flourescence is a very efficient tracer of the companion star in LMXBs. We present a numerical code to simulate time-delayed transfer functions in LMXBs, specific to the case of reprocessing in emission lines. The code is also able to obtain

From the inversion of a time series of high resolution slit spectrograms obtained from the quiet sun, the spatial and temporal distribution of the thermodynamical quantities and the vertical flow velocity is derived as a function of optical depth (logτ) and geometrical height (z). Spatial coherence and phase shift analyses between temperature and

We report on observations of the three-dimensional structure of a sunspot magnetic field from the photosphere to the chromosphere, obtained with the new visible/infrared spectropolarimeter SPINOR. The observations, interpreted with a non-LTE modeling technique, reveal a surprisingly complex topology with areas of opposite-sign torsion, suggesting