The new Moon at March 13rd and 14th provided excellent quality nights at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory. These days Pablo G. Pérez (SHARDS PI) and J. Gallego were visitors at the 10.4m GTC telescope. During this observing run, GUAIX members obtained superb deep images using the first of the medium band filters corresponding to the ESO/GTC SHARDS project.

From 20th to 23rd of October 2009, the III Consolider-GTC meeting was held in the thousand-year-old city of Cádiz. Nearly 100 project members assisted the encounter in the Hotel Atlántico - Parador de Cádiz. The meeting, funded by the CONSOLIDER INGENIO-2010 program of the MICINN, allowed the project members to expose and discuss the proposals and projects related to the scientific exploitation of the Spanish 10m telescope GTC, as well as to enable collaborations between different research groups inside the project. More information here.

After the successful pilot program in 2008, the IScAI will officially start in 2009. IScAI-2009 offers an intensive programme of courses and laboratory work in key areas related to the design and construction of scientific instrumentation. The laboratory work will be done at various research institutions and high-tech companies with world-class instrumentation programs in Europe and America.

IScAI-2009 is open to astronomers, physicists and engineers world-wide.
The web page can be found at http://www.iscai.iac.es/iscai/

Several were the contributions of the GUAIX team to the II Encuentro of the GTC-Consolider project in Alicante. During those days, UCM scientists had the opportunity of meeting their colleagues from all around Spain.