A survey of interstellar NaI D1 and D2 absorption features in the spectra of 104 early-type stars in the second and third Galactic quadrants reveals the large-scale kinematics of the interstellar gas within the Galactic anticenter hemisphere at distances from the Sun between ~70 and ~250pc. Employing a technique that uses both the radial velocities

The existence of an intergalactic globular cluster population in the Coma cluster of galaxies has been tested using surface brightness fluctuations. The main result is that the intergalactic globular cluster surface density (NIGC) does not correlate with the distance to the center of Coma and hence with the environment. Furthermore, comparing these

IAUC 8087 available at Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams.

We present spectroscopy for globular clusters (GCs) in the elliptical galaxy NGC 4365, obtained with the Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrograph on the Keck I telescope. Previous studies have shown that the optical color distribution of GCs in NGC 4365 lacks the bimodal structure that is common in globular cluster systems, showing only a single broad

In this contribution we review the overall features of EMIR, the NIR multiobject spectrograph of the GTC. EMIR is at present in the middle of the PD phase and will be one of the first common user instruments for the GTC, the 10 meter telescope under construction by GRANTECAN at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Canary Islands, Spain). EMIR is

The Galactic Low Mass X-ray Binary GX339-4 was one of the earliest proposed black hole candidates, yet even its most fundamental binary parameters have eluded us for several decades. We present new outburst spectroscopy of GX339-4 which appears to at last reveal the motion of its elusive companion star in fluorescent NIII lines. Based on our multi