In this talk I reviewed some of the major scientific highlights produced in the past decade by Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) researchers using the Nordic Optical Telescope. I presented their main scientific lines of research and potential future areas of development for the telescope from the IAC perspective.

The European Solar Telescope (EST) is an on-axis 4.2-meter solar telescope, the largest solar telescope ever built in Europe. While operating, environmental effects, such as gravity, wind buffeting or thermal loads, will generate wavefront errors that require to be corrected. For this reason, the EST team is developing an active optics strategy to

The European Solar Telescope (EST) is a 4.2-m telescope which has been redesigned with a fully integrated Multi-Conjugate Adaptive Optics (MCAO) into the optical path right after the EST primary mirror. The current baseline configuration considers four altitude Deformable Mirrors (DM) conjugated to 5, 9, 12 and 20 km above the telescope entrance

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has several potential advantages for astronomical instrumentation: particularly the ability to create custom parts with optimised geometries that cannot be produced with traditional manufacturing. The goal of the EU H2020 funded OPTICON (Optical Infrared Coordination Network for Astronomy; grant agreement 730890) A2IM

The works described in the current paper correspond to some exploratory advances that were performed by ESTEYCO in close collaboration with IAC on the European Solar Telescope (EST) main structure beyond the conceptual design activities conducted up to 2011, which were taken as the starting point. The works to develop this advanced conceptual

The constantly increasing needs for astronomical imaging of ever fainter objects as well as for imaging the Earth from space require much higher angular resolution and dynamic range than current optical telescopes can deliver. Mirrors are the key elements of these systems; but they are technologically difficult to improve because they must maintain