ELMER is an optical instrument for the GTC designed to observe between 3650 and 10000 Armstrong. The observing modes for the instrument at Day One shall be: Imaging, Long Slit Spectroscopy, Mask-multi-object spectroscopy, Slit-less multi-object spectroscopy, Fast Photometry and Fast short-slit spectroscopy. It will be installed at the Nasmyth-B

In this article we first give a brief historically based survey of kinematic observations, essentially of rotation curves, of spiral galaxies produced as techniques have advanced and new wavelength ranges have opened up. We then describe the basic inferences from kinematic measurements relevant to galactic structure: the rotational velocity and the

The rotation curves of low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies suggest that they possess significantly higher mass-to-light (M/L) ratios than their high surface brightness counterparts, indicating that LSB galaxies may be dark matter dominated. This interpretation is hampered by the difficulty of disentangling the disc and dark halo contributions

We propose to use the low spectral resolution capabilities of IRS to obtain high signal-to-noise mid-infrared spectra of a sample of 70 Ultra- and Hyperluminous extragalactic objects at high redshift discovered in the ELAIS survey. The European Large Area ISO Survey (ELAIS) offers the largest complete mid-IR, high-z, high-L extragalactic sample

Ionized gas and stellar kinematics have been measured along the major axes of seventeen nearby spiral galaxies of intermediate to late morphological type. We discuss the properties of each sample galaxy, distinguishing between those characterized by regular or peculiar kinematics. In most of the observed galaxies, ionized gas rotates more rapidly

These notes are a didactic overview of the non perturbative and background independent approach to a quantum theory of gravity known as loop quantum gravity. The definition of real connection variables for general relativity, used as a starting point in the program, is described in a simple manner. The main ideas leading to the definition of the