Spectroscopic and photometric surveys of the Milky Way and its stellar clusters in the Gaia era

Abstract

This contribution to the Stellar Clusters & Associations: A RIA Workshop on Gaia deals with surveys of stars, in particular spectroscopic surveys, with attention to their impact on cluster studies, and their connectionwith Gaia. I review some of the scientific reasons why we want large spectroscopic surveys, what requirements these put on the instrumentation. Then I turn to a review of the current and future instrumentation that will enable us to complement Gaia's excellent distances and proper motions with the desired ground-based spectroscopy to obtain additional radial velocities and elemental abundances of high quality. This is a very fast moving area with several new surveys using existing and future multi-object spectrographs on 4- and 8-meter telescopes. As things change rapidly it is difficult to give adequate information on all these projects, but with the inclusion of links to the relevant web-sites the reader should be able to follow the latest developments as they unfold.

Invited review presented at "tellar Clusters & Associations: A RIA Workshop on Gaia", held in Granada May 2011