We present the first results of a project aimed at the combined study of massive stars and their surrounding nebulae by means of a detailed study of Galactic H II regions ionized by only one massive star. With this, we intend to check the validity of the new generation of massive star model atmosphere codes in terms of ionizing flux distribution

We propose to complete the observations for a project to produce definitive Color-Magnitude Diagrams (CMDs) for a carefully chosen sample of galactic globular clusters, using the Mosaic Camera on the Blanco telescope. The large field size will enable us to efficiently cover to beyond the published tidal radius for even the larger clusters in our

We report on H-band, ground-based observations of a transit of the hot Neptune GJ 436b. Once combined to achieve sampling equivalent to archived observations taken with Spitzer, our measurements reach comparable precision levels. We analyze both sets of observations in a consistent way, and measure the rate of orbital inclination change to be of 0

We present a feasible design concept and the science drivers for the proposed near-infrared interferometric integral field spectrograph at the LBT. Combining interferometric resolution with an integral field spectrograph is a very promising instrument concept for detailed studies down to below 10 mas angular resolution in the NIR. If approved, the

The Inspector is the graphical user interface of the GTC Control System. It is implemented in Java and gives a unified view of the whole system by representing it as hierarchical browser of distributed objects. The ability to resolve at runtime the domain objects running distributed on the real time systems and use that domain information to

As a sub-set of activities within the THINGS (The HI Nearby Galaxy Survey) collaboration we have used the HI maps of the complete set of galaxies observed in the THINGS survey with the VLA to search for the presence of high velocity clouds. Detections were made in 9% of the cases, with a lower detection limit of just under 105 solar masses. Given