The Grain Telescopio CANARIAS (GTC) is a high performance 10-m class telescope which is being built by the IAC (Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias). It will be installed at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, on the island of La Palma. First light is planned for end-2002. Image quality, operational efficiency and reliability are emphasized in

The conceptual design of the GTC optical system was completed in summer of 1997. It will be a Richey Cretien type telescope with a flat tertiary mirror to feed Nasmyth and folded Cassegrain focal stations. The telescope will have a segmented primary mirror and an entrance pupil area equivalent to a circular aperture of 10 m diameter. The details of

A detailed NLTE investigation of Fe I lines is carried out for the MACKKL quiet solar atmospheric model using a very realistic iron atomic model. This improved atomic model consists of about 250 multiplets and nearly 500 UV, optical and IR bound-bound and bound-free transitions including the regime near the Fe I continuum. The authors find and

We have performed a deep, wide-field imaging survey of the Pleiades cluster (Melotte 22) in the R and I-bands to search for very low-mass stars and brown dwarfs. The survey extends over ~ 2.5 square degrees around the cluster's center down to a ~ 90% completeness limit of R ~ 23 and I ~ 22. We find 26 objects whose location in the (I, R-I) color

We present the results of a three-year campaign of broad-band photometry in the near-infrared J, H, K and L' bands for a sample of approximately 250 giant stars carried out at the Observatorio del Teide (Tenerife, Spain). Transformations of the Telescopio Carlos Sanchez system into/from several currently used infrared systems are extended to the

A search for bright galaxies associated with radio sources from the Westerbork Northern Sky Survey (WENSS) minisurvey has been carried out. A galaxy counterpart was found for 402 of almost 10,000 radio sources. Of these a radio and optically complete sample, with a flux density limit at 325MHz of 30mJy and a limiting red magnitude of 16, can be