The search for planets hosting life is one of the major goals of the astronomy of this century. To this purpose, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the NASA have begun long term reasearch programs. The first step is the discovery of exosolar planetary systems, and the full understanding of their formation mechanisms. However, detection of exosolar planets requires very sophisticated techniques. It was only in 1995 that a group of swiss astronomers, led by Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz...

A new and very efficient pipeline is now available at TNG for the reduction of IR images taken with NICS. The system, called SNAP (acronym for Speedy Near-IR data Automatic reduction Pipeline) takes the raws NICS images of a mosaic(1) and, depending on the command options, can: Correct the frames for the cross talking effect. Determine their relative offsets. Define an "optimum sky", which does not include any of the objects detected in the final (combined) image. Correct the images for...

The Adaptive Optics module of TNG (AdOpt@TNG) has completed a further step towards the achievement of high resolution images under regular seeing conditions. AdOpt@TNG is the only AO system permanently mounted on an astronomical telescope to use the Pyramid Wavefront Sensor and during the nights of April 29th and 30th, 2002 (with seeing around 0.8-1.0 arcsec in V) it has been possible to acquire diffraction limited images of stars in K' band (FWHM=0.12arcsec at 2.2microns). The Strehl Ratio...

After a successful test phase in the past months, a new 1435 gr/mm VPH (Volume Phase Holographic) Grism is now available on Dolores@TNG, and will replace the existing Echelle Grism.This VPH Grism, developed by the gOlem group of the Brera Observatory, in Merate, provides a substantial upgrade of the observing capabilities of Dolores, being the only instrument in the northern telescopes currently equipped with such a new-generation grism.Up to date, the best spectroscopic resolution (namely,...