We describe an unusual undergraduate course that has been running successfully for over ten years and is built around a two-week field trip to Tenerife. The purpose of the visit is twofold: firstly to spend a week working in collaboration with students from the Universidad de La Laguna and secondly to spend a week at the Observatario del Teide

EMIR is a intermediate resolution near infrared (1.0 - 2.5 microns) multiobject spectrograph with image capabilities, to be mounted on the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC). EMIR is being built by a consortium of Spanish, French and British institutions, led by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias. EMIR is being funded by GRANTECAN and the Plan

Elmer is an imager and spectrograph in the visible wavelength range for the Gran Telescopio CANARIAS, GTC. Elmer is being managed directly by the GTC Project Office, who has done the whole Preliminary Design and large part of the Detailed Design. This instrument shall operate at the telescope on Day One, as a back up in case of delays of the major

Spectroscopic observations of 48 emission-line objects of M 33 have been obtained with the multi-object, wide field, fibre spectrograph AF2/WYFFOS at the 4.2 m WHT telescope (La Palma, Spain). Line intensities and logarithmic extinction, cbeta , are presented for 42 objects. Their location in the Sabbadin & D'Odorico diagnostic diagram (Hα /[S II]

We present low-resolution, integrated Keck spectra of the five globular clusters (GCs) of the Fornax dwarf spheroidal galaxy. We find a tentative age spread among the clusters, with the GC H5 younger by 2-3 Gyr than the others. The clusters generally appear to be very metal-poor ([Fe/H]~-1.8), with the cluster H4 slightly more metal-rich at [Fe/H]=

The morphological properties and spatial distribution of stellar populations are studied for DDO 165 and DDO 181, two dwarf irregular (dIrr) galaxies outside the Local Group. The study uses B and R photometry from which are derived (1) color-magnitude diagrams of the resolved stars, (2) surface brightness profiles for the unresolved stars, and (3)