The GTC is a 10.4m telescope being built in La Palma, Spain, by a consortium lead by the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC). Other members of the collaboration include Mexico and the University of Florida (US). The telescope is now complete, the main activity currently being the installation of the control system. This will lead to the

Aims.We investigate the flow field in the sunspot canopy using simultaneous Stokes vector spectropolarimetry of three sunspots (θ=27°, 50°, 75°) and their surroundings in visible (630.15 and 630.25 nm) and near infrared (1564.8 and 1565.2 nm) neutral iron lines. Methods: .To calibrate the Doppler shifts, we compare an absolute velocity calibration

Introduction: The European Galactic Plane Surveys (EGAPS) will for the first time ever map the complete galactic plane (10x360 degrees) down to 21st magnitude in u', g', r', i' and H-alpha and partly in He I 5875. It will complete a database of ~1 billion objects. The aim of EGAPS is to study populations of short-lived stellar and binary phases in

We have developed TGMETalpha in order to determine T[eff], logg, [Fe/H] and [alpha/Fe] for large samples of FGK stars observed at various spectral resolutions. Tests on several hundred echelle spectra of reference stars degraded at low resolution (R=1.000) have provided typical rms precisions of sigma_ T [eff]~150 K, sigma_logg~0.44, sigma_[Fe/H]~0

Table 23 (tables 2 & 3 of the paper) contains the derived stellar parameters, metallicities, and masses, for stars not known to harbor any planetary-mass companion. Table 4 contains the derived stellar parameters, metallicities, and masses, for extra-solar planet-host stars. (2 data files).

We present narrowband observations of the Hα emission in a sample of 31 satellites orbiting isolated giant spiral galaxies. The sample studied spans the range -19 mag