Ongoing and future optical and near-infrared surveys focused on the study of the Galactic plane are briefly presented. Their potential is illustrated by the first results from IPHAS, the INT Photometric Hα Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane.

The ALHAMBRA survey aims to cover 4 deg2 using a system of 20 contiguous, equal width, medium-band filters spanning the range 3500 Å-9700 Å plus the standard JHKs filters. Here we analyze deep near-IR number counts of one of our fields (ALH08) for which we have a relatively large area (0.5 deg2) and faint photometry (J = 22.4, H = 21.3, and K = 20

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Making use of public spectra from Cimatti et al., we measure for the first time the velocity dispersion of spheroid-like massive (M sstarf ~ 1011 M sun) galaxies at z ~ 1.6. By comparing with galaxies of similar stellar mass at lower redshifts, we find evidence for a mild evolution in velocity dispersion, decreasing from ~240 km s-1 at z ~ 1.6 down

We present results on low-resolution mid-infrared (MIR) spectra of 70 IR-luminous galaxies obtained with the infrared spectrograph (IRS) onboard Spitzer. We selected sources from the European Large Area Infrared Survey with S15 > 0.8 mJy and photometric or spectroscopic z > 1. About half of the samples are quasi-stellar objects (QSOs) in the

We present an adaptation of the rotation-corrected, m-averaged spectrum technique designed to observe low signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), low-frequency solar p-modes. The frequency shift of each of the 2l + 1 m spectra of a given (n, l) multiplet is chosen that maximizes the likelihood of the m-averaged spectrum. A high S/N can result from combining