A rationale is presented for the use of a relatively low-altitude (15km) Rayleigh Laser Guide Star to provide partial adaptive optics correction across a large fraction of the sky on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope. The scientific motivation in relation to the available instrumentation suite is discussed and supported by model performance

Having acquired since July, 1989, a complete 11-year solar cycle of full disk data, the IRIS++ network has now made available to anyone the longest helioseismic data base to-date. A few results obtained from this very long time series are briefly presented here, with some emphasis on the low degree p-mode frequencies themselves, and their

We present outburst spectroscopy of GX 339-4 that may reveal the motion of its elusive companion star. N III lines exhibit sharp emission components moving over ~300 km s-1 in a single night. The most plausible interpretation of these components is that they are formed by irradiation of the companion star and the velocities indicate its orbital

Chemical abundance data for the Galaxy show a wide dispersion. We try to check if this dispersion may also be found with chemical evolution models as an effect of variations of an Initial Mass Function (IMF) which follows a Poisson's distribution

Discontinuities in the wavefront phase or amplitude affect curvature sensor (CS) response. These discontinuities may be the result of an improper alignment of the elements of a segmented mirror in either piston or tip-tilt. We describe the CS response with an analytical approach based on the Fresnel approximation of the diffracted field and show

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