In this work, we present a methodology and a corresponding code-base for constructing mock integral field spectrograph (IFS) observations of simulated galaxies in a consistent and reproducible way. Such methods are necessary to improve the collaboration and comparison of observation and theory results, and accelerate our understanding of how the kinematics of galaxies evolve over time. This code, SimSpin, is an open-source package written in R, but also with an API interface such that the code can be interacted with in any coding language. Documentation and individual examples can be found at the open-source website connected to the online repository. SimSpin is already being utilised by international IFS collaborations, including SAMI and MAGPI, for generating comparable data sets from a diverse suite of cosmological hydrodynamical simulations.

Jellyfish galaxies are starburst galaxies with ram-pressure-stripped tails and blue star-forming knots. These galaxies show a snapshot of star formation enhancement triggered by ram pressure stripping (RPS), being important targets for studying the RPS-induced star formation in gas-rich galaxies. Here we investigate the star formation activity of five jellyfish galaxies in massive clusters, using Gemini GMOS/IFU observations. From the Hα-derived star formation rates (SFRs), we find that our sample shows higher SFR excess to the star formation main sequence than the jellyfish galaxies in low-mass clusters. From the compiled sample of jellyfish galaxies in low-mass to high-mass host clusters, we suggest that the star formation activity of jellyfish galaxies has positive correlations with host cluster mass and degree of RPS. These relationships imply that higher ram pressure environments tend to trigger stronger starbursts in jellyfish galaxies in the early stage of RPS.

KMOS is a multi-object near-infrared integral field spectrograph built by a consortium of UK and German institutes for the ESO Paranal Observatory. KMOS completed commissioning at the ESO VLT in Spring 2013 and was made available to the user community from Oct 2013. We present the unique capabilities of KMOS for 3D galaxy surveys and report on the on-sky performance verification measured during three commissioning runs on the ESO VLT in 2012/13 and some of the early science results.

We present here a software for simulations of observations made with an Integral Field Spectrograph attached to an extreme adaptive optics system, with the main goal of simulating direct detection of extrasolar planets and to test the capabilities in detecting planets of an instrument based on IFS on large telescopes. This code, written for IDL, has been conceived within the CHEOPS project, a second generation “Planet Finder” instrument for ESO's VLT; but it has been extended to the case of various ELTs. Here we describe in detail the procedure adopted in order to simulate realistic values of speckle noise, Adaptive Optics corrections, specific instrumental features and the efficiency of a Simultaneous Differential Imaging technique to increase the signal of the planet.