EMIR is a near-IR, multi-slit camera-spectrograph under development for the 10m GTC on La Palma. It will deliver up to 45 independent R equals 3500-4000 spectra of sources over a field of view of 6 feet by 3 feet, and allow NIR imaging over a 6 foot by 6 foot FOV, with spatial sampling of 0.175 inch/pixel. The prime science goal of the instrument

The ISOPHOT detectors were continuously exposed to high energy cosmic particles hits, resulting in an average hit rate frequency of an event per every 7 s. The net effect is a disturbance of the readout voltages, which decreases the signal-to-noise ratio and hence the photometric accuracy level. Thanks to the highly redundant readout method of

We analyse the new ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project) D2 cloud data to ascertain if a connection between cosmic-ray flux and cloud cover exists. Despite a previous finding that total-cloud factor and cosmic-ray fluxes were correlated, our results indicate that only the low-level cloud follows solar activity over the full

The stochastic nature of the IMF in young stellar clusters implies that clusters of the same mass and age do not present the same unique values of their observed parameters. Instead they follow a distribution. We address the study of such distributions, parameterised in terms of their confidence limits, in evolutionary synthesis models. These

IAUC 7472 available at Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams.

We have measured the center-to-limb variation (CLV) of parameters describing geometric and photometric statistical properties of the solar granulation at 6708 Å. This work is based on an excellent series of white-light images obtained with the Swedish Vacuum Solar Telescope at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory, La Palma, during the partial solar