This article shows how some recent developments in the observation and theoretical modeling of weak polarization signals in chromospheric spectral lines are facilitating fundamental new advances in our ability to investigate the magnetism of the solar outer atmosphere via spectropolarimetry.

The authors have used high resolution IUE spectra from their own studies and from the archive to examine the Mg II h and k chromospheric emission cores of a sample of late-type dwarfs and giants. Sharp photospheric absorptions were used to provide a velocity rest-frame with respect to each stellar photosphere with the IUE-limited precision of ±4 km

A representative set of profiles is presented for the Ca II H resonace line in Stokes V and I, for the quiet sun, plages, sunspot umbrae, and a flare, as well as one example of the Ca II K line in a sunspot penumbra. The degree of polarization is highest in the spots and zero in the quiet sun, within error limits. The V profile asymmetries are

We report broad-band imaging observations which reveal a circum-nuclear gas ring in NGC 4151. The ring is delineated by two arc-like features probably resulting from dust extinction of the background stellar continuum. These features are distributed along opposite quadrants of an elliptical ring which has a semi-major axis of length 1.8kpc and is

Climate diagnostic archives appears to be a very useful tool for astronomical site assessment. These climatological databases combine data from meteorological archives for different data sources (radiosoundings, satellites, etc) and meteorological models to derived any parameter at a particular selected location. Although the products from climate

Recent work (Corradi et al. 2015; Jones et al. 2016) has shown that the phenomenon of extreme abundance discrepancies, where recombination line abundances exceed collisionally excited line abundances by factors of 10 or more, seem to be strongly associated with planetary nebulae with close binary central stars. To further investigate, we have