This contribution gives an overview of the ground-based observing efforts organized to collect the auxiliary data mandatory for the calibrations and tests of the Gaia data processing.

We are conducting tests of optical and electronics components of JEMEUSO at the Telescope Array site in Utah with a ground-based "EUSO-TA" detector. The tests will include an engineering validation of the detector, cross-calibration of EUSO-TA with the TA fluorescence detector and observations of air shower events. Also, the proximity of the TA's

We present monthly statistics for a two-year meteorological site-testing campaign at the two candidate sites for the location of the GTC. The windroses presented here are a fairly complete representation of the wind regimes prevailing at the lower site and indicate that at night the predominant wind direction for the site is from the NE, whereas

A fluid theory has been developed by taking account of gyro-viscosity to study wave propagation characteristics in a homogeneous pair-ion magnetized plasma with a cylindrical symmetry. The exact dispersion relations derived by the Hankel-Fourier transformation are shown comparable with those observed in the experiment by Oohara and co-workers. The

We describe the reduction of data taken with the PACS instrument on board the Herschel Space Observatory in the Science Demonstration Phase of the Herschel-ATLAS (H-ATLAS) survey, specifically data obtained for a 4 × 4 deg2 region using Herschel's fast-scan (60arcsecs-1) parallel mode. We describe in detail a pipeline for data reduction using

We derive exact expressions for the degree of lineal polarization over a resolved or integrated stellar disc due to resonance scattering and the Hanle effect from a dipolar or quadrupolar distribution of magnetic fields. We apply the theory of scattering polarization within the formalism of the spherical tensors representation for the density