The Variability of solar IRradiance and Gravity Oscillations (VIRGO) experiment contains two types of active cavity radiometers for monitoring of the solar constant, two three channel sunphotometers for the measurement of spectral irradiance at 335, 500 and 865 nm and a low resolution imager with 12 pixels. The main scientific objective is probing

Trojan asteroids located in the Jupiter Lagrangian points L4 and L5 (60 degrees ahead and behind Jupiter) are widely believed to be primordial bodies since their orbits are stable over the age of the Solar System. They seem to have been formed in a region of the solar nebula rich in frozen volatiles and to have never suffered selective induction

We have analysed very high-quality HARPS and UVES spectra of 95 solar analogs, 24 hosting planets and 71 without detected planets, to search for any possible signature of terrestial planets in the chemical abundances of volatile and refractory elements with respect to the solar abundances. We demonstrate that stars with and without planets in this

We present initial results from a water-vapour monitoring campaign initiated in 1996. A certain amount of caution must still be applied to the interpretation of the water-vapour statistics as a large majority of the data have been taken in summer, or autumn. Continued monitoring is accumulating strong evidence of a seasonal effect, with typically

We present WeCAPP, a long term monitoring project searching for microlensing events towards M 31. Since 1997 the bulge of M 31 was monitored in two different wavebands with the Wendelstein 0.8 m telescope. In 1999 we extended our observations to the Calar Alto 1.23 m telescope. Observing simultaneously at these two sites we obtained a time coverage

We report the first results of a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) program which performed WFPC2 multi-color imaging of a sample of A- and B-type supergiant stars in M31 and M33. This sample has previously been studied by us spectroscopically with the High Resolution Echelle Spectrograph (HIRES) on the 10m Keck-I Telescope. In particular, fits to the P