ASTRONET is an ERA-Net financed by the European Commission FP6 under the initiative Integrating and Strengthening the European Research Area (ERA). ASTRONET was created by a group of European funding agencies in order to establish a comprehensive long-term planning for the development of European astronomy. The objective of this effort is to

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EMIR is a near-infrared wide-field camera and multi-object spectrograph being built for the 10.4m Spanish telescope (Gran Telescopio Canarias, GTC) at La Palma Observatory. The Data Factory Pipeline (DFP) will be optimized for handling and reducing near-infrared data acquired with EMIR. Both reduced data and associated error frames will be

The study of meson photoproduction on the nucleon is a very important tool to complete the puzzle of baryon excited states. GRAAL aim is the measurement of cross sections and of beam asymmetries for all the photonuclear reactions accessible in the energy range from 600 MeV up to 1.5 GeV. In the following preliminary results of the Σ beam asymmetry

The Hubble Space Telescope has provided the first clear evidence for weaker winds of metal-poor massive stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, confirming theoretical predictions of the metallicity dependence of mass-loss rates and wind terminal velocities. For lower luminosity O-type stars however, derived mass-loss rates are orders of magnitude

Soft X-ray transients (SXTs) provide the best evidence for the existence of stellar-mass black holes (BHs) with almost 20 confirmed systems based on dynamical studies. However, there is an estimated population of a few thousand dormant BH binaries, which slowly reveal themselves through secular X-ray outbursts. Therefore, new strategies aimed at