The maximum exploitation of the excellent astronomical quality of the `Roque de los Muchachos' Observatory is one of the most important design criteria for the GTC Project. The installations of the GTC are being designed in such a way as to minimize local seeing degradation while providing adequate support for the operation and maintenance of the

We imaged the field of GRB980329 in the optical and in the near-infrared starting 20 hours after the event, at the ESO NTT, at the NOT, at the APO and at the TIRGO. In the first night we detect an object of R = 23.6 +/- 0.2 within the BeppoSAX NFI error box at the same position as a transient VLA source proposed as the radio afterglow of this GRB

This paper analyses the various ways of carrying out near IR multi-object spectroscopic studies in space. We show that ground-based observations would have limited results except in the 1-1.5 micrometers wavelength where large telescope of the 8m class would be approximately equivalent to a 1m in space. Beyond 2m, even an instrument such as the

An inversion technique has been developed to recover LTE one-dimensional model photospheres for late-type stars from very high resolution, high signal-to-noise stellar line profiles. It is successfully applied to the Sun by using a set of clean Ti I, Ca I, Cr I, and Fe I normalized line profiles with accurate transition probabilities and taking

The Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) is undertaking the design and construction of a common-user near IR spectrograph (LIRIS) for the Cassegrain focus of the 4.2 m William Herschel Telescope sited at the Observatorio del Roque de Los Muchachos. LIRIS will be a near IR intermediate-resolution spectrograph designed to operate over a

The imaging photopolarimeter ISOPHOT on-board the European satellite ISO houses 144 background detectors of Si:Ga, Si:P, Ge:Ga and stressed Ge:Ga, all sampled by newly developed cold read-out electronics. There is large temporal radiation damage to most of these detectors on the daily passage through the earth's radiation belts. In addition the Ge