Over the past years observations of young and populous star clusters have shown that the stellar initial mass function (IMF) appears to be an invariant featureless Salpeter power law with an exponent α=2.35 for stars more massive than a few Msolar. A consensus has also emerged that most, if not all, stars form in stellar groups and star clusters

The near-infrared spectrograph LIRIS was first commissioned on the WHT on the nights of 15-19 Feb 2003. During all that time the instrument functioned with no major failures. At the time of commissioning LIRIS included imaging and spectroscopic observing modes. Spectroscopy could be done at low resolution (about 700 using the narrowest slit of 0.65

We present some results from a new 2D spectrograph, SAURON (Bacon et al. 2001; de Zeeuw et al. 2002). Each SAURON, exposure provides stellar as well as gaseous kinematics and absorption line strength in the wavelength range (4800-5200 Å), covering an area of (33"x41"). We have observed a sample of 24 early-type spiral galaxies, and have obtained

We present the surface photometry and stellar kinematics of NGC 2950, which is a nearby and undisturbed SB0 galaxy hosting two nested stellar bars. We use the Tremaine-Weinberg method to measure the pattern speed of the primary bar. This also permits us to establish directly and for the first time that the two nested bars are rotating with

All the projects of the Extremely Large Telescopes (ELTs) are based on segmented primary mirrors. This idea, solving the problem of producing single mirrors having diameter larger than 8m, introduces the needs for an accurate co-phasing of the various segments. The paper presents some laboratory measurements aimed to investigate the use of the

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