The GTC (Gran Telescopio Canarias) employs an Acquisition and Slow Guiding Sensor based on a Marconi CCD47-20. This chip is also the core sensor for the telescope Segment Figure Sensor. A third sensor, based on a Marconi CCD39-01 implements Fast Guiding and is also used for Wavefront Sensing under continuous rotation. 1 Hz full-frame readouts and

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Although the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) was primarily envisioned as a tool for understanding the nature of the `high redshift' universe, significant discoveries have already been made at lower redshift, z~0, through studies of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. We have begun to explore the nature of the Milky Way by detailed investigation of the

We present near-infrared (JKs) time series data of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) cluster Reticulum. The observing strategy and data reduction (DAOPHOTII/ALLFRAME) allowed us to reach a photometry accuracy of the order of 0.02 mag at limiting magnitudes typical of RR Lyrae stars. We are interested in Reticulum, since it hosts a sizable sample of

Lipid bilayers are key components of biomembranes; they are self-assembled two-dimensional structures, primarily serving as barriers to the leakage of cell's contents. Lipid bilayers are typically charged in aqueous solution and may electrostatically interact with each other and with their environment. In this work, we investigate electrostatics of

Abundances of oxygen in two ultra-metal-poor giants have been derived from measurements of the oxygen triplet at 7771-5Å in the near-IR performed in high-resolution and high S/N ratio spectra obtained with KeckI/HIRES. A detailed non-LTE analysis of Fe lines has been carried out for our targets providing more reliable stellar parameters and