Astronomy is a scienti?c discipline that has developed a rapid and impressive growth in Spain. Thirty years ago, Spain occupied a purely anecdotal presence in the international context, but today it occupies the eighth position in the world in publication of astronomical articles, and, among other successes, owns and op- ates ninety per cent of the world's largest optical telescope GTC (Gran Telescopio Canarias). The Eighth Scienti?c Meeting of the Spanish Astronomical Society (Sociedad Espanol a de Astronom a, SEA), held in Santander in July 7-11 2008, whose p- ceedings are in your hands, clearly shows the enthusiasm, motivation and quality of the present Spanish astronomical community. The event brought together 322 participants, who represent almost 50% of Spanish professional astronomers. This percentage, together with the continuously increasing, with respect to previous SEA meetings, number of oral presentations and poster contributions (179 and 127 respectively), con?rms that the SEA conferences have become a point of reference to assess the interests and achievements of astrophysical research in Spain. The most important and current topics of modern Astrophysics were taken into accountat thepreliminarymeeting, aswell as the numberandqualityofparticipants and their contributions, to select the invited speakers and oral contributors. We took a week to enjoy the high quality contributions submitted by Spanish astronomers to the Scienti?c Organizing Committee. The selection was dif?cult. We wish to acknowledge the gentle advice and commitment of the SOC members."

Religion is playing an increasingly central role in African political and developmental life. This book offers an empirical and theoretical reflection on the relationships between religion, politics and development in Africa; the meanings of religion in non-Western contexts and the way that is embedded in the everyday life of people in Africa.

China's most sophisticated system of computational astronomy was created for a Mongol emperor who could neither read nor write Chinese, to celebrate victory over China after forty years of devastating war. This book explains how and why, and reconstructs the observatory and the science that made it possible.

For two thousand years, a fundamental ritual of government was the emperor's "granting the seasons" to his people at the New Year by issuing an almanac containing an accurate lunisolar calendar. The high point of this tradition was the "Season-granting system" (Shou-shih li, 1280). Its treatise records detailed instructions for computing eclipses of the sun and moon and motions of the planets, based on a rich archive of observations, some ancient and some new.

Sivin, the West's leading scholar of the Chinese sciences, not only recreates the project's cultural, political, bureaucratic, and personal dimensions, but translates the extensive treatise and explains every procedure in minimally technical language. The book contains many tables, illustrations, and aids to reference. It is clearly written for anyone who wants to understand the fundamental role of science in Chinese history. There is no comparable study of state science in any other early civilization.

Although recent works on Galileo's trial have reached new heights of erudition, documentation, and sophistication, they often exhibit inflated complexities, neglect 400 years of historiography, or make little effort to learn from Galileo. This book strives to avoid such lacunae by judiciously comparing and contrasting the two Galileo affairs, that is, the original controversy over the earth's motion ending with his condemnation by the Inquisition in 1633, and the subsequent controversy over the rightness of that condemnation continuing to our day. The book argues that the Copernican Revolution required that the hypothesis of the earth's motion be not only constructively supported with new reasons and evidence, but also critically defended from numerous old and new objections. This defense in turn required not only the destructive refutation, but also the appreciative understanding of those objections in all their strength. A major Galilean accomplishment was to elaborate such a reasoned, critical, and fair-minded defense of Copernicanism. Galileo's trial can be interpreted as a series of ecclesiastic attempts to stop him from so defending Copernicus. And an essential thread of the subsequent controversy has been the emergence of many arguments claiming that his condemnation was right, as well as defenses of Galileo from such criticisms. The book's particular yet overarching thesis is that today the proper defense of Galileo can and should have the reasoned, critical, and fair-minded character which his own defense of Copernicus had.

Almost 50 years after the launch of Sputnik, the diversity and criticality of the technology and applications already in place to exploit the high-frontier is impressive. And it is no exaggeration to state that a precondition for meeting human needs, coping with environmental problems, and maintaining security is the successful exploitation of space. Yet no one overview exists to document what we have so far done, and soon plan to accomplish, to utilize the near-Earth space environment. Utilization of Space aims to serve as an authoritative overview for professionals and interested laymen by explaining scientific space utilisation, commercial and entrepreneurial issues, and technological applications. The chapters are written by leading specialists in the respective fields and on a level comprehensible to an educated, but not necessarily technically-trained, reader. Enhanced by informative color illustrations, it is intended not only to transmit useful and timely information to readers, but also to share with them the fascination attached to space activities experienced by those actively engaged in them.

Since the year 2000 the ESA Cluster mission has been investigating the small-scale structures and processes of the Earth's plasma environment, such as those involved in the interaction between the solar wind and the magnetospheric plasma, in global magnetotail dynamics, in cross-tail currents, and in the formation and dynamics of the neutral line and of plasmoids.

This book contains presentations made at the 15th Cluster workshop held in March 2008. It also presents several articles about the Cluster Active Archive and its datasets, a few overview papers on the Cluster mission, and articles reporting on scientific findings on the solar wind, the magnetosheath, the magnetopause and the magnetotail.

This book represents Volume II of the Proceedings of the UN/ESA/NASA Workshop on the International Heliophysical Year 2007 and Basic Space Science, hosted by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Tokyo, 18 - 22 June, 2007. It covers two programme topics explored in this and past workshops of this nature: (i) non-extensive statistical mechanics as applicable to astrophysics, addressing q-distribution, fractional reaction and diffusion, and the reaction coefficient, as well as the Mittag-Leffler function and (ii) the TRIPOD concept, developed for astronomical telescope facilities.

The companion publication, Volume I of the proceedings of this workshop, is a special issue in the journal Earth, Moon, and Planets, Volume 104, Numbers 1-4, April 2009.

We humans are collectively driven by a powerful - yet not fully explained - instinct to understand. We would like to see everything established, proven, laid bare. The more important an issue, the more we desire to see it clarified, stripped of all secrets, all shades of gray. What could be more important than to understand the Universe and ourselves as a part of it? To find a window onto our origin and our destiny? This book examines how far our modern cosmological theories - with their sometimes audacious models, such as inflation, cyclic histories, quantum creation, parallel universes - can take us towards answering these questions. Can such theories lead us to ultimate truths, leaving nothing unexplained? Last, but not least, Heller addresses the thorny problem of why and whether we should expect to find theories with all-encompassing explicative power.

Drawing primarily from critical traditions in social and educational research, this book frames contemporary issues and several conceptual, theoretical-analytical and onto-epistemic approaches towards the development and practice of PAR (Participatory Action Research) in multiple educational spaces and initiatives for socio-cultural change.

The transformation of the Turkish state is examined here in the context of globalized frames of neo-liberal capitalism and contemporary schemas of Islamic politics. It shows how the historical emergence of two distinct yet intertwined imaginaries of state structuring, laiklik and Islam, continues to influence Turkish politics today.

Careers in astronomy for women (as in other sciences) were a rarity in Britain and Ireland until well into the twentieth century. The book investigates the place of women in astronomy before that era, recounted in the form of biographies of about 25 women born between 1650 and 1900 who in varying capacities contributed to its progress during the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are some famous names among them whose biographies have been written before now, there are others who have received less than their due recognition while many more occupied inconspicuous and sometimes thankless places as assistants to male family members. All deserve to be remembered as interesting individuals in an earlier opportunity-poor age. Placed in roughly chronological order, their lives constitute a sample thread in the story of female entry into the male world of science.

The book is aimed at astronomers, amateur astronomers, historians of science, and promoters of women in science, but being written in non-technical language it is intended to be of interest also to educated readers generally.

Starting with 19th century narratives of African American travelers to the Holy Land, the following chapters probe Islam's role in urban social movements, music and popular culture, relations between African Americans and Muslim immigrants, and the racial politics of American Islam with the ongoing war in Iraq.

Contributing authors share a deep commitment to naming ways in which social exclusion has diminished the educational and life chances of many students in our various sites of work and regions of the world - and to moving the discourse and action beyond pedagogies of exclusion to a more visionary and inclusive praxis.

While the number and range of international peace programmes continues to proliferate, there is a marked absence of interdisciplinary and comparative research to guide academic development and inform practice in this challenging arena. It is these deficits that the present volume aims to address. This collection of peace education efforts in conflict and post-conflict societies brings together an international group of scholars to offer the very latest theoretical and pedagogical developments for long term solutions.

Rather than measure the actions of their subjects by reference to either universal rationality or cultural relativism, contributors in this volume describe ordinary people as they value human relationships and reason through the commonplace contradictions of their local way of life in a global age.

These astute essays describe the way ordinary people value human relationships and reason through the commonplace contradictions of their local way of life in a global age, rather than measure the actions of their subjects as evidence of either universal rationality or shared cultural beliefs. Each contributor conveys the ways in which people challenge the ascribed moral standards of custom, religious belief, bureaucratic policies through passionate words such as anecdotes, joke, rumors, and gossip. By evaluating moral reasoning at a local level, contributors work to answer the question, what is a good life?

The Solar-B satellite was launched in the morning of 23 September 2006 (06:36 Japan time) by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (ISAS/JAXA), and was renamed to Hinode ('sunrise' in Japanese). Hinode carries three - struments; the X-ray telescope (XRT), the EUV imaging spectrometer (EIS), and the solar optical telescope (SOT). These instruments were developed by ISAS/JAXA in cooperation with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan as domestic partner, and NASA and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (UK) as international partners. ESA and N- wegian Space Center have been providing a downlink station. All the data taken with Hinode are open to everyone since May 2007. This volume combines the ?rst set of instrumental papers of the Hinode mission (the mission overview, EIS, XRT, and the database system) published in volume 243, Number 1 (June 2007), and the second set of papers (four papers on SOT and one paper on XRT) published in Volume 249, Number 2 (June 2008). Another SOT paper cited as Tarbell et al. (2008) in these papers will appear later in Solar Physics.

[the text below needs editing and we must be careful not to say things about Dan Brown's book that could get Springer in legal trouble] Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, was first published in 2003; its sales have reached 40 million worldwide. The book mixes a small spice of fact into a large dollop of fiction to create an entertaining novel of intrigue, adventure, romance, danger and conspiracy, which have been imaginatively worked together to cook up the successful bestseller. Most interest in the book's origins has centred on the sensational religious aspects. Dan Brown has written: 'All of the art, architecture, secret rituals, secret societies, all of that is historical fact.' This gives an air of authenticity to the book. Brown has, however, made up the religious doctrines, or based them on questionable accounts by others. The locations of the actions of The Da Vinci Code are not, however, made up. The present book is the scientific story behind the scene of several of the book's actions that take place on the axis of France that passes through Paris. The Paris Meridian is the name of this location. It is the line running north-south through the astronomical observatory in Paris. One of the original intentions behind the founding of the Paris Observatory was to determine and measure this line. The French government financed the Paris Academy of Sciences to do so in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. It employed both astronomers - people who study and measure the stars - and geodesists - people who study and measure the Earth. This book is about what they did and why. It is a true story behind Dan Brown's fiction. This is the first English language presentation of this historical material. It is attractively written and it features the story of the community of scientists who created the Paris Meridian. They knew each other well - some were members of the same families, in one case of four generations. Like scientists everywhere they collaborated and formed alliances; they also split into warring factions and squabbled. They travelled to foreign countries, somehow transcending the national and political disputes, as scientists do now, their eyes fixed on ideas of accuracy, truth and objective, enduring values - save where the reception given to their own work is concerned, when some became blind to high ideals and descended into petty politics. To establish the Paris Meridian, the scientists endured hardship, survived danger and gloried in amazing adventures during a time of turmoil in Europe, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic War between France and Spain. Some were accused of witchcraft. Some of their associates lost their heads on the guillotine. Some died of disease. Some won honour and fame. One became the Head of State in France, albeit for no more than a few weeks. Some found dangerous love in foreign countries. One scientist killed in self defence when attacked by a jealous lover, another was himself killed by a jealous lover, a third brought back a woman to France and then jilted her, whereupon she joined a convent. The scientists worked on practical problems of interest to the government and to the people. They also worked on one of the important intellectual problems of the time, a problem of great interest to their fellow scientists all over the world, nothing less than the theory of universal gravitation. They succeeded in their intellectual work, while touching politics and the affairs of state. Their endeavours have left their marks on the landscape, in art and in literature.

"Quantum Gravitation" approaches the subject from the point of view of Feynman path integrals, which provide a manifestly covariant approach in which fundamental quantum aspects of the theory such as radiative corrections and the renormalization group can be systematically and consistently addressed. It is shown that the path integral method is suitable for both perturbative as well as non-perturbative studies, and is already known to offer a framework for the theoretical investigation of non-Abelian gauge theories, the basis for three of the four known fundamental forces in nature. The book thus provides a coherent outline of the present status of the theory gravity based on Feynman s formulation, with an emphasis on quantitative results.

Topics are organized in such a way that the correspondence to similar methods and results in modern gauge theories becomes apparent. Covariant perturbation theory are developed using the full machinery of Feynman rules, gauge fixing, background methods and ghosts. The renormalization group for gravity and the existence of non-trivial ultraviolet fixed points are investigated, stressing a close correspondence with well understood statistical field theory models. The final chapter addresses contemporary issues in quantum cosmology such as scale dependent gravitational constants and quantum effects in the early universe."

In the context of the NASA Deep Impact space mission, comet 9P/Tempel1 has been at the focus of an unprecedented worldwide long-term multi-wavelength observation campaign. The comet was also studied throughout its perihelion passage by various sources including the Deep Impact mission itself, the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer, Rosetta, XMM and all major ground-based observatories in a wavelength band from cm-wave radio astronomy to x-rays.

This book includes the proceedings of a meeting that brought together an audience of theoreticians and observers - across the electromagnetic spectrum and from different sites and projects - to make full use of the massive ground-based observing data set. The coherent presentation of all data sets illustrates and examines the various observational constraints on modelling the cometary nucleus, cometary gas, cometary plasma, cometary dust, and the comet's surface and its activity.

China's most sophisticated system of computational astronomy was created for a Mongol emperor who could neither read nor write Chinese, to celebrate victory over China after forty years of devastating war. This book explains how and why, and reconstructs the observatory and the science that made it possible.

For two thousand years, a fundamental ritual of government was the emperor's "granting the seasons" to his people at the New Year by issuing an almanac containing an accurate lunisolar calendar. The high point of this tradition was the "Season-granting system" (Shou-shih li, 1280). Its treatise records detailed instructions for computing eclipses of the sun and moon and motions of the planets, based on a rich archive of observations, some ancient and some new.

Sivin, the West's leading scholar of the Chinese sciences, not only recreates the project's cultural, political, bureaucratic, and personal dimensions, but translates the extensive treatise and explains every procedure in minimally technical language. The book contains many tables, illustrations, and aids to reference. It is clearly written for anyone who wants to understand the fundamental role of science in Chinese history. There is no comparable study of state science in any other early civilization.

This work investigates the permissibility and viability of property rights on the - lestial bodies, particularly the extraterrestrial aspects of land and mineral resources ownership. In lay terms, it aims to ?nd an answer to the question "Who owns the Moon?" The ?rst chapter critically analyses and dismantles with legal arguments the issue of sale of extraterrestrial real estate, after having perused some of the trivial claims of celestial bodies ownership. The only consequence these claims have on the plane of space law is to highlight the need for a better regulation of extraterrestrial landed property rights. Next, thebook addresses theapparent silenceofthelawinthe?eldofextraterr- trial landed property, scrutinizing whether the factual situation on the extraterrestrial realms calls for legal regulations. The sources of law are examined in their dual dimension - that is, the facts that have caused and shaped the law of extraterrestrial real estate, and the norms which express this law. It is found that the norms and rules regarding property rights in the celestial realms are rather limited, failing to de?ne basic concepts such as celestial body.

Analyzes diverse contemporary reactions to the depiction of the Holocaust and other cultural traumas in museums, movies, television shows, classroom discussions, and bestselling books. This work also describes several effective pedagogical strategies dedicated to overcoming student resistances to critical analysis and social engagement.

Jupiter's ice moon Europa is widely regarded as the most likely place to find extraterrestrial life. This book tells the engaging story of Europa, the oceanic moon. It features a large number of stunning images of the ocean moon's surface, clearly displaying the spectacular crack patterns, extensive rifts and ridges, and refrozen pools of exposed water filled with rafts of displaced ice. Coverage also features firsthand accounts of Galileo's mission to Jupiter and its moons. The book tells the rough and tumble inside story of a very human enterprise in science that lead to the discovery of a fantastic new world that might well harbor life.

1st edition: Winner of the 2004 IAA Life Sciences Book Award!

This 2nd Edition represents a complete revision with about 23% more pages and new material compared to the first edition; it includes several recent studies involving astronauts and cosmonauts; and discusses the new field of space tourism. It deals with psychological, psychiatric, and psychosocial issues that affect people who live and work in space. Unlike other books that focus on anecdotal reports and ground-based simulation studies, this book emphasizes the findings from psychological research conducted during actual space missions. Both authors have been active in such research. What is presented in this readable text has previously been found only in scientific journal articles. Topics that are discussed include: behavioral adaptation to space; human performance and cognitive effects; crewmember interactions; psychiatric responses; psychological countermeasures related to habitability factors, work-design, selection, training, and in-flight monitoring and support; and the impact of expeditionary missions to Mars and beyond.

People finding this book of interest will include psychology and social science students and professors in universities, medical students and residents in psychiatry and aerospace medicine, human factors workers in space and aviation professions, individuals involved with isolated environments on Earth (e.g., the Antarctic, submarines), aerospace workers in businesses and space agencies such as NASA and ESA, and anyone who is interested in learning the facts about the human side of long-duration space missions.

1st edition reviews:

a ~Drs. Kanas and Manzey have produced acomprehensive review of the issues and research in the areas of space psychology and psychiatry. This includes a long overdue up-to-date compilation of findings from research performed in space as well as anecdotal reports. The authors' personal involvement and experience in space research and operations shows throughout the book in its presentation and research of the issues as well as in the insights offered. Highly informative, well organized and written at a level appropriate for a broad range of readers, this book will be a reference source for space professionals, researchers, students, and interested laymen alike. a ~

Leena Tomi, Deputy Director, Operational Space Medicine, Canadian Space Agency
Jean-Marc Comtois, B.Eng., M.D. Director, Operational Space Medicine, Canadian Space Agency

'An excellent book by two outstanding experts. The refreshing mix between review and original research results spiced with personal experiences makes it interesting for every reader.'

Oliver Angerer, M.D., Human Exploration Science Coordinator, European Space Agency

"This book is not just a record of what can go wrong with regard to mental health and performance, but explores a number of prudent psychological, ergonomic, and design engineering countermeasures to help guide future mission planners and spacecraft engineers[a ]]Written in a clear and engaging style, this book will not only interest the general space enthusiast, but all human factors specialists and anyone else studying the human reaction to extreme and unusual environments. As a comprehensive account of what we have learned so far about the psychological challenges of space travel, Space Psychology andPsychiatry should also be on the bookshelf of any researcher plotting the future course of human spaceflight."

Ergonomics in Design