The Gaia Science Alerts reported in mid-september 2016 three supernovae candidates (among many others) that we observed and confirmed with mercator telescope: Gaia16bic, Gaia16bib and Gaia16biv. The first one is one of the most beautiful SN I have ever observed:

I observed the near earth object (NEO) 410777 2009FD from the Mercator telescope. It was so exciting that I built this animation where we can see it crossing the sky:

New version with only minor bug fixes such as:

• Continuum fit was failing when the user has the latest version of the python dependencies.
• The "Find line masks" option from the visual interface was not working.
• The pre-processing stage of the iSpec pipeline failed when run in parallel.

Several important improvements were implemented in this new version:

• iSpec now uses the SPECTRUM capabilities to compute synthetic spectra with hyperfine structure and isotopes
• Alpha elements are automatically enhanced when the analysed stars are metal poor. It follows the standard mixture of the MARCS model atmosphere.
• A complete automatic pipeline based on iSpec (synthetic spectral fitting technique) is released as an example (included in the virtual machine too).

iSpec is released for the first time to the scientific community. Detailed description in Blanco-Cuaresma et al. 2014.