Discovery of the true nature of the halo of the Galaxy has long been limited by the number of stars with available spectroscopy and photometry. This constraint will soon be lifted. While undertaking a thorough spectroscopic follow-up of ~ 1,000,000 extragalactic sources, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will ALSO obtain spectra of as many as ~

En la presente tesis se aplica una nueva técnica, la Espectroscopía Integral de Campos, al estudio de dos sistemas lente gravitatoria; Q 2237+0305 y SBS 0909+532. Desde el punto de vista técnico, se estudian en detalle los efectos y la corrección a posteriori de la refracción atmosférica diferencia. Esta corrección era necesaria para obtener los

EMIR (Espectrógrafo Multiobjeto Infrarrojo) is a wide-field, near-infrared, multi-object spectrograph, with image capabilities, which will be located at the Nasmyth focus of GTC (Gran Telescopio Canarias). It will allow observers to obtain many intermediate resolution spectra simultaneously, in the nIR bands Z, J, H, K. A multi-slit mask unit will

I present results of a high-resolution imaging survey of barred S0--Sa galaxies which show that the central regions of these galaxies are surprisingly complex, and often dominated by dynamically cool components. In particular, inner bars --- secondary, small-scale bars (typically less than a kiloparsec in radius) located inside of, and probably

We report on an ongoing study of disk galaxy merger simulations and their implications for the Fundamental Plane (FP) of elliptical galaxies.

EMIR (Espectrografo Multiobjeto Infrarrojo) is a near-infrared wide-field camera and multi-object spectrograph to be built for the 10.4m Spanish telescope (Gran Telescopio Canarias, GTC) at La Palma. The Data Reduction Pipeline (DRP), which is being designed and built by the EMIR Universidad Complutense de Madrid group, will be optimized for