Due to the cosmological redshift many of the most interesting features of the most distant quasars are shifted into the near-IR band, a spectral region where the reduced sensitivity of past instrumentation prevented a detailed study of many of their spectral features. The Near Infrared Spectrograph (NICS) operating at the TNG has been equipped with a low dispersion-high throughput element (an Amici prism) which enables to study the broad spectral features typical of quasars with...

This is a typical Flat with the M.O.S. facility.

This image show all the desidered objects (21) on the slits. The dimension of each slit is about 1.2 arcsec.

Pre-Imaging with D.o.lo.res of open cluster Be 17 to identify the targets for Multi Object Spectroscopy (M.O.S).

On September 17th, 2000, "First Light" with NICS. This is a composite image of NGC1073 using the K', H and J filters with a scale of 0.25 arcsec/pixel (Large Field Camera 4x4 arcmin).

Another composite image taken with the Large Field Camera of NICS. Thi is NGC2023 using the K', H2 and J filters with a 0.7 arcsec seeing.

NICS image of the Globular Cluster M15 in the K' filter with 2 min. of exposure time, seeing 0.6 arcsec. The field is about 4x4 arcmin.

Color picture of M27 (the Dumbell Planetary Nebula) made with U, V and R frames taken with Dolores. The seeing was 1 arcsec. The red color is mostly due to Halpha hydrogen line, while green and blue colors are mostly due to lines of [OIII] and [OII] respectively.

True color combined image for the nearby galaxy NGC 6946 made with frames taken with Dolores (B, V and R). This Sc spiral galaxy which is only 5.5 Mpc distant (about 18 millions years light) has been a prolific producer of supernovae during the last century (SNe 1917A, 1939C, 1948B, 1968D, 1969P and 1980 K). Four of these SNe have been of Type II, which is indicative of an high rate of massive star formation.