The second phase of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE-2), a part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV (SDSS-IV), will commence operations in 2014. APOGEE-2 represents a significant expansion over APOGEE-1, not only in the size of the stellar sample, but also in the coverage of the sky through observations in both the

We present integral-field spectroscopic observations with the VIMOS-IFU at the VLT of fast (2000-3000 kms-1) Balmer-dominated shocks surrounding the northwestern rim of the remnant of supernova 1006. The high spatial and spectral resolution of the instrument enable us to show that the physical characteristics of the shocks exhibit a strong spatial

The SDSS-III Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) is a high resolution (R ~23,000) near-IR (H-band) spectroscopic survey of 100,000 Milky Way stars designed to chemically trace the formation and evolution of Galactic stellar populations. In addition to the primary survey, the APOGEE spectrograph has been fitted with 10

Massive galaxies at z>2 were a factor of 4 smaller than their present-day local counterparts. In the nearby universe (z

Context. The homogenization of the stellar parameters is an important goal for large observational spectroscopic surveys, but it is very difficult to achieve it because of the diversity of the spectroscopic analysis methods used within a survey, such as spectrum synthesis and the equivalent width method. To solve this problem, constraints to the

We show preliminary results of an ongoing investigation aimed at determining the configuration of the magnetic field vector in the threads of a quiescent hedgerow solar prominence using high-spatial resolution spectropolarimetric observations taken in the He I 1083.0 nm multiplet. The data consist of a two-dimensional map of a quiescent hedgerow