GTC Spectroscopic Surveys of Planetary Nebulae in the Milky Way and M31

We report spectroscopic surveys of planetary nebulae (PNe) in the Milky Way and Andromeda (M31), using the 10.4-m Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC). The spectra are of high quality and cover the whole optical range, mostly from 3650 Å to beyond 1 μ m, enabling detection of nebular emission lines critical for spectral analysis and photoionization modeling. We obtained GTC spectra of 24 compact (angular diameter <5 arcsec) PNe located in the Galactic disk, ∼3–20 kpc from the Galactic centre, and that can be used to constrain stellar evolution models and derive radial abundance gradients of the Milky Way. We have observed 30 PNe in the outer halo of M31 using the GTC. These halo PNe are uniformly metal-rich and probably all evolved from low-mass stars, consistent with the conjecture that they formed from the metal-rich gas in M31 disk but were displaced to their present locations due to galaxy interactions.