THE SAURON PROJECT
           Reading the fossil record of galaxy formation

SAURON is a panoramic integral-field spectrograph on the 4.2m William
Herschel Telescope on La Palma, custom-built for measuring the stellar
and gaseous kinematics and the line-strength distributions of a
representative sample of nearby early-type galaxies and spiral
bulges. These provide the intrinsic shape of the galaxies, their
orbital structure, the mass-to-light ratio as a function of radius,
the frequency of kinematically decoupled cores and masses of nuclear
black holes and the relation between orbital structure and the age and
metallicity of the stellar populations. The talk will give an overview
of the project, and present recent results.