VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) is a public ESO near-IR variability survey aimed at scanning the Milky Way Bulge and an adjacent section of the mid-plane. VVV observations started in October 2009 during ESO science verification. Regular observations for the first year of the survey have been conducted since February 2010 and will cover a

We report on low-resolution spectroscopy of GX339-4 during its current, extended X-ray ``off'' state in May 2000 (r=20.1) obtained with the VLT Focal Reducer/low dispersion Spectrograph (FORS1). Although we do not positively detect the secondary star in GX339-4 we place an upper limit of 30 percent on the contribution of a ``normal'' K-type

Aims: The aim of the project is to characterise the two components of the brown dwarf system nearest to the Sun, WISE J104915.57-531906.1 (also called Luhman 16AB) at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. Methods: We obtained high signal-to-noise intermediate-resolution (R ~ 6000-11 000) optical (600-1000 nm) and near-infrared (1000-2480 nm)

The Tarantula Survey employs three modes of the Fibre Large Array Multi-Element Spectrograph (FLAMES) instrument on the VLT: Medusa-Giraffe, ARGUS-Giraffe and UVES. Most of the Medusa observations were obtained over the period 2008 October to 2009 February. (2 data files).

In the frame of the EU funded ELT Design Study, a wavefront characterization campaign has been conducted at Paranal VLT Observatory in December 2007 involving concurrent measurements with DIMM, MASS, GSM, MOSP, LuSci and SCIDAR. The campaign goals and instrumentation are described and preliminary results are presented.

OSIRIS (Optical System for Imaging and low Resolution Integrated Spectroscopy) is the first light instrument of the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC). It provides a flexible and competitive tunable filter (TF). Since it is based on a Fabry-Perot interferometer working in a collimated beam, the TF transmission wavelength depends on the position of the