Context. Great strides have been made in recent years in the understanding of the mechanisms involved in the formation and evolution of planetary systems. Despite this, many observational findings have not yet been corroborated by astrophysical explanations. A fine contribution to the study of planetary formation processes comes from the study of

Context. In the era of large surveys and space missions, it is necessary to rely on large samples of well-characterized stars for inter-calibrating and comparing measurements from different surveys and catalogues. Among the most employed photometric systems, the Johnson-Kron-Cousins has been used for decades and for a large amount of important

Variations of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) in external galaxies have been inferred from a variety of independent probes. Yet the physical conditions causing these variations remain largely unknown. In this work, we explore new spatially resolved measurements of the IMF for three edge-on lenticular galaxies in the Fornax cluster. We

We report the discovery of ancient massive merger events in the early-type galaxies NGC 1380 and NGC 1427, members of the Fornax galaxy cluster. Both galaxies have been observed by the MUSE integral-field-unit instrument on the VLT as part of the Fornax3D project. By fitting recently developed population-orbital superposition models to the observed

The Adaptive and Lucky Imagine Optics Lightweight Instrument (ALIOLI) is a portable Adaptive Optics (AO) system capable of being installed on different medium-sized telescopes due to a modular approach to its components. The Wavefront Sensor (WFS) module is designed to be used with three different WFSs: Shack-Hartmann (SH), Two Pupil Plane Position

The European Solar Telescope (EST) is a next generation large-aperture solar telescope, to be located in the Canary Islands. It will be optimized for studies of the magnetic coupling of the solar atmosphere. This will require diagnostics of the thermal, dynamic and magnetic properties of the plasma over many scale heights, by using multi-wavelength