GUAIX member Juan Carlos Muñoz Mateos has attended the 214th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, held in Pasadena (California) from June 7 to June 11, as well as two smaller meetings of the S4G and LVL surveys. The AAS meeting brought together over 1100 astronomers, mostly from the USA, who presented and discussed their latest results through several talks and posters. Juan Carlos presented a poster describing the radial distribution of dust properties in the SINGS sample, as well as an ongoing analysis of integral field spectroscopy data of NGC4654 as part of the CLUES collaboration, leaded by Armando Gil de Paz. Despite the busy week and June Gloom, the attendants managed to find some spare time and have some fun together, including a Dodgers-Phillies baseball game with some members of the S4G team. As you can guess from Juan Carlos' face, he has no idea what is going on in the match.

Two other separate work meetings took place right before and after the AAS meeting itself, corresponding to two Spitzer projects in which Armando and Juan Carlos are involved. The Local Volume Legacy Survey (LVL, leaded by Janice Lee) has gathered IRAC and MIPS infrared data for a complete sample of 258 galaxies within 11 Mpc. Together with GALEX ultraviolet images, as well as ground-based optical data, this multiwavelength data-set will help to unveil the interplay between star formation and the interstellar medium in the local universe.

The Spitzer Survey for Stellar Structure in Galaxies (S4G, leaded by Kartik Sheth) comprises near-IR images at 3.6 and 4.5 microns of more than 2300 galaxies within 40 Mpc. Many of them are already available in the Spitzer archive, and the remaining ones will be acquired shortly as part of the Spitzer warm phase. These huge data-set of near-IR images will constitute an excellent inventory of the stellar mass and galactic structure in the local universe.