E. KONTIZAS Astronomical Institute National Observatory of Athens P. O. Box 20048 Athens GR-1181O GREECE The international conference on "Wide-Field Spectroscopy" and its sub ject matter were agreed during the general assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in August 1994 by the Working Group of Com mision 9 "Wi de-Field Imaging". This meeting gave an opportunity to world experts on this subject to gather in Athens, in order to discuss the cur rent exploitation and the impending opportunities that exist in the area of multi-object spectroscopy, with particular emphasis on: 1. Astronomical instruments, data acquisition, processing and analysis techniques. 2. Astrophysical problems best tackled through wide-field, multi-object spectroscopy. The new fibre optic technology offers an important tool for the advancement of basic research and the development of industrial applications. Astronom ical spectroscopy is a field of astronomy which has contributed much to the advancement of fundamental physics. The spectra of hot stars have been used to determine the well-known Balmer formula for the wavelength of hydrogen lines, in the late 19th century. Since then, spectroscopy has made enormous progress in stellar atmosphere studies, in kinematics, and in the detection of high redshifts in the Universe. The traditional techniques of obtaining wide-field spectroscopic data are based on slitless spectroscopy (objective prism). Several observations, world wide, make use ofthese tech niques in order to obtain information on the spectral properties of objects in large areas of the sky.

Editing the proceedings of a scientific meeting is not an easy task. Sometimes people who give an excellent talk do not send the manuscript by the deadline. However, this time, thanks to the punctuality of all the participants, we have this excellent volume for the workshop on mass losing pulsating stars and their circumstellar matter prepared in time. Almost all of the oral presentations including the summary are collected in this volume. We regret that we cannot put in this volume a few posters that we failed to receive before the editorial work. The workshop was planned as a small meeting with less than fifty attendants because the city of Sendai was far from the most of the active institutions. However, the number of submitted papers exceeded the SOC's expectation; many interesting contributions had to be scheduled in the poster session. Still, the oral sessions were so tight that many participants might have felt frustrated for the shortage of discussions. The organizers of the workshop have to apologize to the attendants for the inconvenience caused from such a happy underestimate about the size of the workshop.

This book reveals the remarkable revolution which has occurred in infrared astronomy in recent years as the result of technology breakthroughs in the development and availability of tiny imaging devices known as arrays'. The book contains the proceedings of a conference at the University of California, Los Angeles in July 1993 at which about 300 participants from all over the world met to discuss the progress and astronomical applications of infrared array detectors. A key feature of the book is the mix of papers describing the detector technology, astronomical instruments or observational methods, with those describing the latest, exciting astrophysical conclusions based on measurements made with the new arrays. In many cases, the images and spectra shown were spectacular, and it was difficult to appreciate that the results were for infrared rather than optical wavelengths. Astronomers, instrument designers and representatives of the infrared detector industry were all present. Reviews of the state-of-the-art in near infrared imaging and spectroscopy and mid-to-far infrared imaging and spectroscopy from ground-based observatories are mixed with reviews of planned space missions such as HST-second generation instruments, ISO, and SIRTF. Prospects for IR astronomy from Antarctica are also described. Finally, the first infrared astronomical science from the 10-m W.M. Keck Telescope is described. Also, numerous astronomical results and new instrumentation ideas are summarized in over 100 poster papers. This book provides an invaluable reference work and an excellent introduction for all astronomers to the rapidly growing field of infrared astronomy. Scientific topics range from studies of solar system objects to galaxies at very high redshifts, and include almost everything in between e.g., star forming regions, the Galactic Center, globular clusters, starburst galaxies and cosmology. Only a few years ago none of these studies would have been possible.

The Workshop "Optical Detectors for Astronomy" was held during October 8-10, 1996 at the headquarters of the European Southern Observatory in Garching, Germany. This was the third meeting of its kind, previous meetings being held in 1991 and 1993, but this is the first ESO "CCD Workshop" that has published proceedings. Most of the leading manufacturers and major astronomical observatories were represented, with the 117 attendees coming together from 14 different countries that spanned every continent on Earth. The motivation for the ESO CCD Workshop series is the creation of informal and open venue of information exchange about astronomical CCD detectors and systems. Judging from the reaction and feedback of the participants, the 1996 workshop was as successful as the previous editions, which is a credit to all who attended. The Workshop was organized as a mixture of invited talks, oral presentations, poster sessions and roundtable discussions, the latter used to foster a free exchange of ideas among participants. These technical sessions were complemented by an opening reception and a congenial evening in downtown Munich, which included a walking tour of the historic area followed by dinner at the famous Franziskaner brewery and an after dinner talk by Walter Kosonocky, who reviewed the history of CCD technology.

The IAU Colloquium No. 143 "The Sun as a Variable Star: Solar and Stellar Irradiance Variations" was held on June 20 - 25, 1993 at the Clarion Harvest House, Boulder, Colorado, USA. The main objective of this Colloquium was to review the most recent results on the observations, theoretical interpreta tions, and empirical and physical models of the variations observed in solar and stellar irradiances. A special emphasis of the Colloquium was to discuss the results gained on the climatic impact of solar irradiance variability. The study of changes in solar and stellar irradiances has been of high interest for a long time. Determining the absolute value of the luminosity of stars with different ages is a crucial question for the theory of stellar evolu tion and energy production of stellar interiors. Observations of the temporal changes of solar and stellar irradiances - in the entire spectral band and at different wavelengths - provide an additional tool for studying the physical processes below the photosphere and in the solar- stellar atmospheres. Since the Sun's radiative output is the main driver of the physical processes with in the Earth's atmosphere, the study of irradiance changes is an extremely important issue for climatic studies as well. Climatic models show that small, but persistent changes in solar irradiance may influence the Earth's climate.

Long-term monitoring is of fundamental significance in solving many important problems in astrophysics and, furthermore, has unequalled value in extending observational runs with small telescopes for the education of young astronomers in order to teach them how to secure high-quality observational data over many years. The Impact of Long-Term Monitoring on Variable Star Research contains reports based on the analysis of data collected in the visible, IR and radio measurement ranges, as well as the design and history of well known photometric systems. Though the reporting of novel results forms an important part of the book, there are also reports of eight discussion sessions covering more general areas, such as extinction monitoring, the problems of archival storage of astronomical data, service observation, the role played by long-term monitoring in graduate teaching and thesis supervision, the interplay between the great observational effort and theory, the contribution of LTM to new knowledge of fundamental data, and the increasing decommissioning of telescopes of modest aperture.

The nonlinear theory of oscillating systems brings new aspects into the study of variable stars. Beyond the comparison of linear periods and the estimate of stability, the appearance and disappearance of possible modes can be studied in detail. While nonlinearity in stellar pulsations is not a very complicated concept, it generally requires extensive and sometimes so phisticated numerical studies. Therefore, the development of appropriate computational tools is required for applications of nonlinear theory to real phenomena in variable stars. Taking trends in variable star studies into consideration, the International Astronomical Union organized a colloquium for the nonlinear phenomena of variable stars at Mito, Japan in 1992. The colloquium served to give an overview of the new frontiers of variable star studies and to encourage further development of this field. The colloquium covered the fundamental theory, interesting observational facts, and the numerical modeling. The publication of the proceedings was somewhat delayed since one of the editors, M. T., was overwhelmed by administrative work. We are sorry that the excellent reviews of Drs. H. :Mori, M. Sano, and K. Makishima cannot be found in the proceedings. We also miss the summary given by Dr. W. W. Dziembowski. Throughout the editing procedure Dr. Y. Tanaka of Ibaraki University kindly helped us. Because of the unfortunate delay of the publication~ the significance of several papers may be affected. Even so, we believe that the papers are useful to variable star researchers because of their scientific importance.

This NATO AS was the third in the series of Advanced Study Institutes on neutron stars, which started with 'Timing Neutron Stars', held in Qe me near izmir, Turkey (April 1988), followed by 'Neutron Stars, an Interdis ciplinary Subject', held in Agia Pelagia on the island of Crete (September 1990). The first school centered on our main observational access to neu tron stars, i. e. the timing of radio pulsars and accretion powered neutron stars, and on what timing of neutron stars teaches us of their structure and environment. The second school had as its theme the interplay between diverse areas of physics which find interesting, even exotic applications in the extreme conditions of neutron stars and their magnetospheres. As the field has developed, with the number of observed neutron stars rapidly in creasing, and our knowledge of many individual neutron stars getting deeper and more detailed, an evolutionary picture of neutron stars has started to emerge. This led us to choose 'The Lives of the Neutron Stars' as the uni fying theme of this third Advanced Study Institute on neutron stars. Different types of neutron star activity have been proposed to follow one another in stages during the lives of neutron stars in the same basic population; the evolutionary connection between low-mass X-ray binaries and millisecond radio pulsars is perhaps the prime example."

Massive stars occupy an exceptional place in general astrophysics. They trigger many if not all of the important processes in galactic evolution whereas due to their intrinsic brightness, they offer the (only until now) possibility to study the stellar content and stellar behaviour in distant galaxies. The last, say, 25 years, massive stars have been the subject of numerous meetings discussing the influence of massive stars on population synthesis, the number distribution of different types of massive stars, the LBV phenomenon, WR stars, X-ray binaries, stellar winds in massive stars, chemical pecularities in massive stars, supernova explosions of massive stars and the important SN1987A event, the influence of massive stars and chemical evolution of galaxies. It is clear that without a theory of stellar evolution, the study of these topics loses a lot of its significance. Massive star evolution therefore got a chance in these meetings, but rarely as a prime subject. The state of the art, the physical processes and the uncertainties in stellar evolution were barely touched. Even more, the influence of close binaries in all these massive star meetings slowly disappeared the last, say, 13 years without any scientific justification, although a significant fraction of stars occurs in close binaries with periods small enough so that both components will interact during their evolution. Denying the binaries or not discussing their influence on results and conclusions, makes the latter very uncertain or even completely unreliable.

The pilot boat just moved away and'its lights are already fading towards the coast of Northeastern Queensland over which Saturn is going to set. There is still quite some time to go before dawn. The big ship has now regained her cruise speed following its roughly northwesterly route in the South Coral Sea along the chain of nearby reefs. Few people are around at this time, except a dozen early birds sharing some 'shipshaping' exercise on the top deck and taking advantage of the relative coolness of the night. On my way down to the stateroom, I cannot but stop once more in front of that elegant composition by British artist Brigid Collins (1963-) hanging in the monumental staircase between Decks 7 and 8. That piece 2 of art, a 1.8x 1.8m oil on canvas plus collage entitled Berinl in honour of the Danish explorer, gathers together many navigation-related themes of the time: Suns, Moons, planets, sky maps, astrolabes, small telescopes, as well as drawings, diagrams and charts of all kinds. It is somehow a digest of how astronomical information was then collected, made available, and used.

It is with great joy that we present a collection of essays written in honour of Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, who completed 60 years of age on July 19, 1998, by his friends and colleagues, including several of his for mer students. Jayant has had a long research career in astrophysics and cosmology, which he began at Cambridge in 1960, as a student of Sir Fred Hoyle. He started his work with a big bang, expounding on the steady state theory of the Universe and creating a new theory of gravity inspired by Mach's principle. He also worked on action-at-a-distance electrodynamics, inspired by the explorations of Wheeler, Feynman and Hogarth in that direction. This body of work established Jayant's rep utation as a bold and imaginative physicist who was ever willing to take a fresh look at fundamental issues, undeterred by conventional wis dom. This trait, undoubtedly inherited from his teacher and mentor, has always remained with Jayant. It is now most evident in his untir ing efforts to understand anomalies in quasar astronomy, and to develop the quasi-steady state cosmology, along with a group of highly distin guished astronomers including Halton Arp, Geoffrey Burbidge and Fred Hoyle. In spite of all this iconoclastic activity, Jayant remains a part of the mainstream; he appreciates as well as encourages good work along conventional lines by his students and colleagues. This is clear from the range of essays included in this volume, and the variety and distribution of the essayists.

This volume contains results gained from the EU-funded 6th Framework project ADIGMA (Adaptive Higher-order Variational Methods for Aerodynamic Applications in Industry). The goal of ADIGMA was the development and utilization of innovative adaptive higher-order methods for the compressible flow equations enabling reliable, mesh independent numerical solutions for large-scale aerodynamic applications in aircraft industry. The ADIGMA consortium was comprised of 22 organizations which included the main European aircraft manufacturers, the major European research establishments and several universities, all with well proven expertise in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The book presents an introduction to the project, exhibits partners methods and approaches and provides a critical assessment of the newly developed methods for industrial aerodynamic applications. The best numerical strategies for integration as major building blocks for the next generation of industrial flow solvers are identified. "

In recent years aperture synthesis and interferometry have become very powerful tools in radioastronomy. Investigation of distant galaxies, for example, have revealed structures with sizes of less than a kiloparsec. In general, the study of galaxies has benefited from the great power of these techniques. Radar applications have also dramatically increased their quality by using the interferometry principle. Tracking and airborne radar can now determine position and velocity of objects with a much higher accuracy. This book describes in the first six, short chapters the basics of interferometry and aperture synthesis. The following two, long chapters treat the aspects of radioastronomical interferometers and radar applications of interferometry in great detail. The text offers readers a very good opportunity to familiarize themselves with the mathematical background of these very complex techniques. For researchers and students in radioastronomy and electrical engineering.

It is now a well established tradition that every four years, at the end of winter, a group of "celestial mechanicians" from all over the world gather at the "Alpen gasthof Peter Rosegger" in the Styrian Alps (Ramsau, Austria). This time the colloquium was held from March 17 to March 23, 1996 and was devoted to the Dynamical Behaviour of our Planetary System. The papers covered a large range of questions of current interest: theoretical questions (re- nances, universal properties, non integrability, transport, ... ) and questions about numerical tools ( symplectic maps, indicators of chaos, ... ) were particularly well represented; the never ending problem of the sculpting of the asteroid belt was also qui te popular. You will find in the following pages a pot-pourri of what we listen to; you will miss of course the diversity of accents with which the tunes were delivered: from China, from Japan, from Brazil, from the United-States of America and from all over Europe, East and West. Let us not forget that the comet 199682 (Hyakutake) came to visit us; many an evening was spent on the deck of the Alpengasthof contemplating this celestial visitor who liked to play hide-and-seek behind the spruce trees.

This book reports the Proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop on "An gular Momentum Evolution of Young Stars" held from 17 to 21 September 1990 at Noto, Italy. The workshop had its immediate origin in a discussion about the availability of stel lar rotation data, that took place in 1987 at Viana do Castelo Portugal during the NATO meeting, Formation and Evolution of Low Mass Stars. We recognized that nearly 20 years had passed since the last meeting on stellar rotation and that significant progress in the observation of rotation rates in low mass stars had been made. During the last 20 years, new efficient instrumentation (CCD and photon counting de tectors and echelle spectrographs) and new analysis techniques (profile Fourier analysis) have allowed us to measure rotational velocities as low as 1-2 km/s and to reach low mass stars in young clusters. Even with these advances, rotational velocities of low mass stars would have remained challenging to determine if all single, low mass stars later than GO had rotational velocities of order or less than 10 km/sec. Evidence that this is not always the case was first provided by the photometric variability data obtained by van Leeuwen and Alphenaar for K dwarfs in the Pleiades and more recently by the vsini measurements of low mass stars in several young clusters."

In May 1976, when one of us was temporarily associated with Stras bourg Observatory for lecturing on distance determination methods (Heck 1978), Pierre Lacroute - then in his last year as Director there - mod estly requested comments on a project he had been cherishing for quite a few years, and which he had been presenting to visitors and colleagues: an astrometric satellite. His persuasiveness and persistence won support from the scientific com munity, from the French space agency CNES and from the European Space Agency (ESA): the Hipparcos satellite was born. It was fitting that Lacroute lived long enough after his retirement to attend the launch of his brainchild in 1989 and to see it successfully operational. He knew however he would not enjoy the completion of this long and ambitious mission (he passed away on 14 January 1993, a few days before reaching the age of 87). In May 1997, in the prestigious setting of San Giorgio :Maggiore in Venice, ESA organized a symposium celebrating the presentation of the Hipparcos and Tycho catalogues. That conference signalled also the re lease of the first scientific results based at least partially on Hipparcos data. An impressive proceedings volume (Battrick 1997) of more than nine hundred pages, gathering together almost two hundred contributions, gave evidence of numerous studies in progress, in addition to papers starting to appear in the classical journals. The well-maintained ESA Hipparcos web site (http://astro. estec. esa.

This volume contains the lectures presented at the second course of the International School of Space Chemistry held in Erice (Sicily) from October 20 - 30 1991 at the "E. Majorana Centre for Scientific Culture." The course was attended by 58 participants from 13 countries. The Chemistry of Life's Origins is well recognized as one of the most critical subjects of modem chemistry. Much progress has been made since the amazingly perceptive contributions by Oparin some 70 years ago when he first outlined a possible series of steps starting from simple molecules to basic building blocks and ultimate assembly into simple organisms capable of replicating, catalysis and evolution to higher organisms. The pioneering experiments of Stanley Miller demonstrated already forty years ago how easy it could have been to form the amino acids which are critical to living organisms. However we have since learned and are still learning a great deal more about the primitive conditions on earth which has led us to a rethinking of where and how the condition for prebiotic chemical processes occurred. We have also learned a great deal more about the molecular basis for life. For instance, the existence of DNA was just discovered forty years ago.

The Third Microquasar Workshop (or the 'Fifth' Workshop on Galactic Relativ istic Jet Sources), was held in Granada, Andalucia (Spain) on 11-13 September 2000. The aim of this workshop in Granada, following the previous Microquasar Workshops in Greenbelt (1997) and Paris (1998) and the Workshops on galactic sources with relativistic jets in Jodrell Bank (1996) and Milton Keynes (1998), was to focus on the theoretical and observational aspects of microquasars. The study of microquasars, the sources in our Galaxy displaying powerful re lativistic jets, is a rapidly advancing field in astrophysics. The new instrumentation on ground (MERLIN, SCUBA, VLA, VLT) and aboard satellites (ASCA, BSAX, ISO, IXAE and RXTE) has provided important results, and much more is expected to come from Chandra and XMM-Newton. In the further future, powerful instru mentation will come online in the sub-mm (ALMA) and gamma-rays (INTEG RAL), extending our coverage to important regions for the study of microquasars. Energy transport via relativistic jets is one of the most important physical mechan isms taking place in compact objects. Large efforts have been devoted to properly understand the disk-jet connection, and even the effects of rotation or magnetic fields. Several new important advances have been made recently, both from the point of view of the theoretical treatment of jets and the different new observational tests.

Der bekannte Astronom Karl Schwarzschild (1873-1916) gilt als der Begrunder der Astrophysik und als hervorragender Forscher mit einer erstaunlichen Bandbreite seiner Interessen. Arbeiten zur Himmelsmechanik, Elektrodynamik und Relativitatstheorie weisen ihn als vorzuglichen Mathematiker und Physiker auf der Hohe seiner Zeit aus. Untersuchungen zur Photographischen Photometrie, Optik und Spektroskopie zeigen den versierten Beobachter, der sein Messinstrumentarium beherrscht, und schliesslich arbeitete Schwarzschild als Astrophysiker an Sternatmospharen, Kometen, Struktur und Dynamik von Sternsystemen. Die in seinem kurzen Leben entstandene Fulle an wissenschaftlichen Arbeiten ist in drei Banden der Gesamtausgabe gesammelt, erganzt durch biographisches Material, Annotationen von Fachleuten und einen Essay des Nobelpreistragers S. Chandrasekhar."

In recent years there has been a steadily increasing cross-fertilization between cosmology and particle physics, on both the theoretical and experimental levels. Particle physics has provided new experimental data from the big accelerators in operation, and data from space satellites are accumulating rapidly. Cosmology is still one of the best laboratories for testing particle theory. The present work discusses such matters in the context of inflation, strings, dark matter, neutrinos and gravitational wave physics in the very early universe, field theory at the Planck scale, and high energy physics. A particular emphasis has been placed on a new topology for spatial infinity, on the relation between temperature and gravitational potential, a canonical formulation of general relativity, the neutrino mass, spin in the early universe, the measurement of gravity in the 10--100 m range, galaxy--galaxy and cluster--cluster correlation, black holes, string theory and string/string duality. The work also presents a beautiful review of high energy elementary particle physics, treating the meaning, status and perspectives of unification and standard model gauge couplings.

This unique volume contains the proceedings of two "Non-Sleeping Universe" conferences: "Stars and the ISM" and "From Galaxies to the Horizon." The book provides an overview of recent developments in a variety of areas, covering a very wide range of spatial and temporal scales.

The Galactic cosmic rays have far-reaching effects on the interstellar medium, and they are, in turn, profoundly affected by the particles and fields in space. Supernova remnants and their expanding shock fronts pervade the Galaxy, heating the interstellar medium, and accelerating the cosmic rays. The interplay among the cosmic rays, the interstellar medium in which they propagate, and supernovae has been investigated for decades; yet these studies have generated as many enigmas as they have resolved. These puzzles continue to challenge observers and theorists alike. th This volume is devoted to selected lectures presented in the 7 Course of the International School of Cosmic-Ray Astrophysics in Erice, Italy in July-August, 1990. Alltogether, some 400 participants have attended the biennial sessions of this School since its inception in 1978. As its name implies, the School deals with cosmic-ray phenomena viewed in the broader context of astrophysics. Students and Lecturers are attracted from many astrophysical disciplines. Like earlier courses in this series, the present one was organized under the aegis of the Ettore Majorana Centre as a NATO Advanced Study Institute. Given the diverse scientific backgrounds of the students, it was deemed useful to include lectures at the introductory level. Other lectures and contributed talks were at a more advanced level, featuring new developments. If this collection is useful pedagogically, and if it provides some stimulus and information for the mature research worker, then the editors will feel well rewarded.

This volume is published in honor of Friedrich Hund's 100th birthday. It is a modern review on matter at high densities and pressures in astrophysics from Hund's early contribution to present-day ideas. The relation between the equation of state and the structure of compact cosmic objects is discussed, and two main contributions deal with the equation of state of baryonic matter at nuclear densities and with the numerical solution of the general relativistic field equations for non-rotating and rapidly rotating neutron stars. In a final chapter the present state of asteroseismology is presented as a tool to explore the interior of cosmic objects by analyzing the observed free oscillations of the Earth, the Sun, and white dwarf stars.

The proceedings of the international conference held in honor of Lodewijk Woltjer, focus on the physics, origin and space distribution of AGNs and quasars and their relationship to the environment, a very wide subject which has attracted much of Lodewijk Wolter's research interest. A number of lectures were also dedicated to reviewing the recent observational advances and those that may be attained by the introduction of new and powerful astronomical instrumentation both from the ground and from space, in recognition of the central role played by L. Woltjer in the promotion of the ESO VLT and of his involvement in shaping ESA's space programme Horizon 2000+.

IAU Transactions are published as a volume corresponding to each General Assembly. Volume A is produced prior to the Assembly and contains Reports on Astronomy, prepared by each Commission President. The intention is to summarize the astronomical results that have affected the work of the Commission since the production of the previous Reports up to a time which is about one year prior to the General Assembly. Volume B is produced after the Assembly and contains accounts of Commission Meetings which were held, together with other material. The reports included in the present volume range from outline summaries to lengthy compilations and references. Most reports are in English.